Question

Can I put space characters as separators only if I have any Tag or Bookmark?

Example:

hg log --template "{rev} {author} {tags} {bookmarks} {desc|firstline}\n"

Output:
3: Author1 TIP BKMRK_NAME Another commit
2: Author1   Third commit
1: Author1 TAG1  Second commit
0: Author1   Initial commit

The changesets that don’t have Tags or Bookmarks prints the space characters. I’d like to suppress those extra spaces:

3: Author1 TAG_NAME BKMRK_NAME Another commit
2: Author1 Third commit
1: Author1 TAG1 Second commit
0: Author1 Initial commit

Answer 1

A new style can be created that defines how the start of a collection (i.e. bookmarks), the element in the collection itself and the last element of a collection look like.

Save the following style definition in a file e.g. called “my_style”:

changeset = '{rev} {author}{bookmarks} {desc|firstline}\n'

start_bookmarks = ' ['
bookmark = '{bookmark}, '
last_bookmark = '{bookmark}]'

You then can call hg log with the just newly created style:

> hg log --style /path/to/my_style
6 james [bar, foo, master] b 3
5 james b 2
4 james a 3

This would only insert a space and bracket if there are bookmarks at all (note that there’s no space between {author} and {bookmarks}).

Some nice cli templates as reference can be found here.