Concise CLI switches for template alternatives

[jacg]

I appreciate that the template language gives me fine-grained and almost arbitrary control over how things are displayed.

However, as I identify things that matter to me, to which alternative choices might apply, I'd like a more convenient way to choose between these alternatives.

For example, I can switch between showing committer or author timestamp by adding

--config "template-aliases.'commit_timestamp(commit)'='commit.XXX().timestamp()'"

to the command and tweaking the XXX buried therein. It works, but it's not very user-friendly.

Now imagine I have a number of orthogonal alternatives, for example whether to show absolute or relative timestamps, and so on. Using the --config approach to switching was unwieldy and had a very low signal to noise ration for just a single option: with multiple switches it becomes a nightmare.

Approaches like using command aliases for switching between options would lead to a combinatorial explosion of such aliases. In short, I'm looking for something like good old unix CLI options that affect config alternatives of my choosing.

How could I get orthogonal, composable, concise option switching for my JJ templates?

[jennings]

Define them as aliases?

[aliases]
'relative' = ['--config', 'template-aliases."format_timestamp(timestamp)"="timestamp.ago()"']
'committer' = ['--config', 'template-aliases."commit_timestamp(commit)"="commit.committer().timestamp()"']

$ jj relative committer log
# output displays with relative timestamps and committers instead of authors

This does require explicitly writing log at the end, though.