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Comment by saturn | Hacker News Reader

The one thing I miss after switching to PostgreSQL from MySQL is Sequel Pro. pgAdmin 3, sorry to say, sucks, and I grow tired of rails dbconsole - but that's my only option, really.

Please, someone, make a good osx pg client. Just copy Sequel Pro if you don't know what I mean by that. I would pay a lot of money for a good osx client, I am not kidding, I have to deal with this every day. I cannot be the only one..

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    #> psql mydb

rails dbconsole is the same thing. (it runs psql for you with args as specified in your database config)

Seriously. The command line console for postgres really is that good. I'd rather spend a day in it than any vendor-provided or third party GUI for any database I have ever touched. This includes things like dbVisualizer, SquirrelSQL, pgAdmin3, SQL Server Management Studio, and the various flavors of Toad. A screen session with psql in one display and emacs in the other is heaven.

Sequel Pro is awesome... I think they are working toward offering Postgres support: http://code.google.com/p/sequel-pro/issues/detail?id=362 but haven't seen anything concrete yet.

I just learned SP has bundles, like TextMate. Nifty.

Is Navicat not a good option?

It is not free, but neither is my time. I find that Navicat is awesome.

The Navicat Lite option is free and pretty adequate (on par feature wise with pgAdmin 3).

DbVis is GREAT and multi-db management tool http://www.dbvis.com/

As soon as I see "available on all major operating systems" I groan, because of course it seems to be a Java app. The user experience for Cocoa apps on OS X blows away that of a Java app. The reason Sequel Pro is great is because it feels like a first-rate Mac app and seamlessly fits in with everything else.

You can make a Java app feel almost native on OS X, like with Cyberduck, but it is really, really hard and you have to prioritize that target in your design. Then what happens, as seen with Cyberduck, is the Mac version coming out pretty good and the Windows version feeling a little "off."

I share some of your sentiments about x-plat Java UIs, but DbVisualizer does an admirable job. I now use on Windows for SQL Server for most tasks even when the native GUI is available. Its worth a look.

Just curious, is it a pgadmin3 on OSX that is the problem for you or pgadmin3 in general?

On Windows, I find that I quite like pgadmin3 as compared to MySQL workbench but it's likely just a matter of taste.

You could do alright (and very customizable) with the django admin and introspection. "Somebody" should probably write up a guide on doing that.

Have you tried Aqua Data Studio?

What's wrong with the console ?

Good question; I'm not sure. That said, none (literally none) of my PostgreSQL-using clients use psql, and they're somewhere between amazed and horrified that I prefer it for working with the database.

I'm not against GUIs, but it seems to me that psql has all of the advantages of the GUI administration tools, and then some.

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