override / silence output on change of settable

[gjvc]

when changing a settable, i would like to do my own logging / printing of the fact, and override / silence the built-in output.

For example:

> set package_path devel/mold/2.36
2025-05-22T23:45:05.615 I           t/b/s/shell.py:99   package_path='lang/python/3.10' -> 'devel/mold/2.36'
package_path - was: 'lang/python/3.10'
now: 'devel/mold/2.36'

The logging line is mine, and I would like to silence the two lines below it.

cmd2==2.5.11, python 3.13

[tleonhardt]

@gjvc This is an interesting and reasonable suggestion. I can see several potential ways to go about it, including at least all of the following:

1. Add -q/--quiet flag to the set command that suppresses default output from cmd2. This is easily done. It would require users to add the -q flag each time.
2. Add an optional boolean parameter to the cmd2.Cmd.__init__() method called something like silence_set which has a global effect of silencing the default cmd2 output from the set command. This is also relatively easy and has the benefit of not requiring users to enter anything each time.
3. You can override the do_set method of cmd2.Cmd in your application and modify accordingly. Also easy, but requires work on your end, not on the cmd2 end.

Which do you think would best meet your needs and would provide the best overall user experience?

[tleonhardt]

@gjvc Would simply redirecting the output of that command to /dev/null be a reasonable option for you?

set package_path devel/mold/2.36 > /dev/null
2025-05-22T23:45:05.615 I           t/b/s/shell.py:99   package_path='lang/python/3.10' -> 'devel/mold/2.36'

The easiest option I see is for you to either just redirect to /dev/null or to override the do_set method in your class which inherits from cmd2.Cmd. If you want to override it, just make a copy of our code and delete the line with the poutput call outputting that output. Alternatively, you can change the poutput to a pfeedback and change the quiet setting in your app to default to True.

I don't like the option of adding a -q flag to the set command, it just doesn't feel right for that command. I also don't like the idea of adding another optional parameter to the __init__() method for cmd2.Cmd for this niche case.

If we had it to do over again, we would perhaps choose to use pfeedback instead of poutput to output that info as it isn't really essential, but doing it at this point would be a breaking change which would pretty much be guaranteed to break someone else's application.

[tleonhardt]

@gjvc I moved this to a Discussion since we don't plan on implementing anything on our end, but I wanted to leave it open if you had any more questions.