issue_comments: 871674435

Hi @Illviljan, As I mentioned earlier, your "solution" is not backwards compatible, and it would be counterproductive to update the doctest. Which is also not relevant here and a different issue.

I am not sure what you are trying to show, your datasets look very different from what I am working with, and they miss the point. Then again they also prove my point, pandas and numpy shorten in a canonical way (except the finite number of columns, which may make sense, but I don't like that either and would rather have it wrap but show all columns). xarray doesn't because usually the variables are not simply numbered as in your example.

I am talking about medium sized datasets of a few 10 to maybe a few 100 non-canonical data variables. Have a look at http://cfconventions.org/ to get an impression of real-world variable names, or the example linked above in comment https://github.com/pydata/xarray/issues/5545#issuecomment-870109486. There it would be nice to have an overview over all of them.

If too many variables are a problem, imo it would have been better to say: "We keep it as it is, however, if it is a problem for your large dataset, here is an option to reduce the amount of output: ..." And put that into the docs or the wiki or FAQ or something similar. Note that the initial point in the linked issue is about the time it takes to print all variables, not the amount that gets shown. And usually the number of coordinates and attributes is smaller than the number of data variables. It also depends on what you call "screen", my terminal has currently 48 lines (about 56 in fullscreen, depending on fontsize), and a scrollback buffer of 5000 lines, I am also used to scrolling through long jupyter notebooks. Scrolling through your examples might be tedious (not for me actually), but I will never be able to find typos hidden in the three dots.

@max-sixty No worries, I understand that this is a minor cosmetic issue, actually I intended it as a feature request, not a bug. But that must have gone missing along the way. I guess I could live with 50, any other opinions? I am sure someone else will complain about that too. ;)