I've been working out-of-tree for a replacement for -Qi / -Si, which can be found here: https://github.com/vodik/alpm-dump and I'm looking for some feedback before I start integrating it into pacman. For those not familiar with why I've decided to rewrite this, the existing code is rather clumsy and makes some assumptions: string_display(_("Name :"), alpm_pkg_get_name(pkg), cols); The header is "Name", but the padding is embedded into the string. This forces translation writers to also put the right paddings into their translations, something which they shouldn't be burdened with. Further, `string_display` actually needs to know how long "Name :" is so it can do proper line wrapping. The following lines need to be indented properly. This ends up being recalculated for every header. Instead, if we knew how wide the widest header would be ahead of time, we no longer need to embed padding into translations and we no longer need to calculate line lengths for each print operation. This is what the code in the alpm-dump repository attempts to do. The approach I've taken is have the printing function take an array of const char *. Each index represents a field, like Name or Version. If the index is NULL, its ignored, and if it has a value, it is printed along side corresponding data from the package. For example: static const char *sync_table[LAST_ENTRY] = { [ENTRY_REPOSITORY] = "Repository", [ENTRY_NAME] = "Name", [ENTRY_VERSION] = "Version", [ENTRY_DESCRIPTION] = "Description", [ENTRY_ARCHITECTURE] = "Architecture", ... }; Calculating the max width means iterating across this table once looking for the longest field length. Dumping a package is then a matter of iterating across the table, printing the stored string and then the value that corresponds to the array index. printf("%-*s : ", width, table[index]); switch(index) { case ENTRY_REPOSITORY: indentprint_r(alpm_db_get_name(alpm_pkg_get_db(pkg)), width, 0); break; case ENTRY_NAME: indentprint_r(alpm_pkg_get_name(pkg), width, 0); break; case ENTRY_VERSION: indentprint_r(alpm_pkg_get_version(pkg), width, 0); break; ... } And as an added bonus, alpm-dump is measurably faster than the current code. Not that this matters that much. The current code isn't exactly slow and is still much much faster than stdout is.