It looks like the PostgreSQL development team has decided to rewrite pgAdmin into a new version and I guess they're quite happy about it. A tweet I saw mentioned 10k hours spent on the first version. This makes no sense to me, since after using it for 15 minutes I saw so many problems with it that it cannot really be the application they wanted to produce.
This is just a quick rant about it because I'm trying so hard to get things done with it but it's just not letting me. And it's not because I don't want change. It's because it really doesn't work the way it should. I'll add some pictures later probably to showcase some of these issues.
Now, pgAdmin 3 wasn't perfect or wonderful in any way, but it got the job done. Sure, it hung itself if you had two long queries running at the same time. But at least it did things reasonably.
First of all, it's slow. It takes ages to load data from the server. I don't know why this is, I guess it's loading too much data. pgAdmin 3 showed properties of a table in sub-second times. pgAdmin 4 takes several seconds. This is very annoying.
Also noticed a major issue: put a long-running query in pgAdmin 4. It darkens the window and has a rolling thing. And sucks all the power from one core on my Intel i7 machine! And then it even crashes. Nice. This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
pgAdmin 3 had a small font and everything was nice as lists. pgAdmin 4 has big fonts. It has headings and whatnots that waste screenspace. This wouldn't be the worst thing usually, but I have a lot of tables and a lot of information I want to just see easily.
There is no concept of keyboard commants. Sure, I an run the query with F5, but how about refreshing the tree when I create a new table from SQL query? Right click, refresh, wait. Great.
View data from a table and want to use PgUp/PgDn to move in it? You're out of luck. We don't support that. Want to jump to beginning or end? Don't support that either.
Want to put two query windows into different monitor than the main program? Nope, we have one window and that's all you get.
Want to resize query result windows? You can kinda do it, but only inside the main window. And sometimes the windows are even lost.
Want to switch between tabs? Ctrl-Tab? No, we don't support that. Use the mouse.
Want to copy some value from a result table? No. We don't want you to. That's not allowed.
Truncate table? I'll show some random alert with the title AlertifyJS saying "Are you sure you want to truncate table {}?" which doesn't really make me want to click Yes since I have no idea if the table I want will be truncated.
Oh, and all queries show a nice fading messagebox when they finish. In pgAdmin 3 they just had a status bar which showed this info. I don't need distracting fading boxes, this isn't a consumer web page. This is a professional tool.
Another issue about this flashy fading thing: the information disappears. How many rows did the query return? Who knows. It was there for a second and now it's gone. Oh, wait, I can switch to Messages tab to check it out. Why bother showing the run time and row count on a status bar when I can mouse around and switch tabs?
The tree view doesn't have a horizontal scrollbar. Let's waste screen space for making the treeview larger than needed, otherwise you can't see the information there. But you will see a lot of white space because the information you want is on the 8th level and above. Table names are the 8th level on the tree. Column names are the 10th. You can imagine the white space on the left of them, all wasting screen space.
Column widths in the result grid are by default too small. No, you can't just double click to make them fit, or become bigger, like in pgAdmin 3. You have to manually resize them. And if you rerun the query you have to resize them all over again.
This is just unbelieveable. And this is done by people in the core team, who I would think use this daily and want it to work as smoothly as possible.
So why don't I use pgAdmin 3? Because it doesn't support PostgreSQL 9.5 or 9.6. Oh, and pgAdmin 4 doesn't support older versions of PostgreSQL either. And it doesn't even say anything about it. It just starts to throw errors and database disconnect messages everywhere if you try to connect to, for example, 9.1. At least 3 says "sorry, I might not work since I only support 8.4 - 9.4" and that's fine then.
Could someone please just update pgAdmin 3 to support 9.5 and 9.6? It can't be that big of a deal? Then I could continue using my well working workflow of multiple windows, anywhere I want on the screen. I could check it out myself, but would take some time to get to know the codebase and changes between the versions.
Or could someone in the pgAdmin team just fix these issues? I know it's v1.1 but it should have these basic things done. And please add a multi-window thing like in pgAdmin 3. It is very much needed, I'm sure I'm not the only one feeling this way.
But at least pgAdmin 4 has been done using Javascript and web views. Guess it's a nice way to make a flashy half-baked UI that doesn't support any of the regular keyboard shortcuts or separate windows or anything important like that. But at least it's easily multiplatform.
Note: Thanks to Adam Brusselback I did realize that I had a bit older version of pgAdmin 3, so I can actually use it with 9.6. Sanity restored until they get 4 into working order.