Compress branches

[T3sT3ro]

Take a look at https://github.com/billvanyo/tree_printer.

It is capable of using as much space as possible - child branches can overflow under sibling parent branches, which makes the tree look a lot more compact. Something like that would be nice to have

Another nice feature would be to compress row spacing to compress rows:

                    1                
                    └┐               <-- one row for branches instead of 2 
                     20              
               ┌─────┴─────┐         
               15          24        
           ┌───┴───┐   ┌───┴───┐     
           10      19  21      27    
        ┌──┴──┐   ┌┘   └┐    ┌─┴─┐   
        7     12  16    22   26  29  
      ┌─┴─┐ ┌─┴─┐ └┐    └┐  ┌┘ ┌─┴─┐ 
      5   8 11  14 18    23 25 28  30
     ┌┴┐  └┐   ┌┘ ┌┘                 
     4 6   9   13 17                 
    ┌┘                               
    2                                
    └┐                               
     3                 

ALSO when I pulled and debugged your lib, I saw there are a lot of writes and changes to the LineBuffer, as well as methods that return encoded values (like array of 2 elements encoding properties like position and width — maybe use records or classes with meaningful fields for them?). Maybe it would be possible to avoid changes like that if you had a dynamic list elements per row (like pad, branch, node, branch, pad) which is rewritten in some kind of two-pass bottom-up + top-down fashion?

[davidsusu]

Thank you for your request. I once planned to implement a compact binary tree printer and some compactness options for TraditionalTreePrinter.

It's a serious difficulty that each node's content can have different heights and insets (multiline nodes are first-class citizens). I wouldn't be surprised if this is a computationally hard problem (in any case, a weighted MAX-SAT solver could still help).

I'll think about it some more, so I will leave this open for now.