hg show makes heavy use of shortest() to limit the length of the node
hash.
For the "stack" and "work" views, you are often looking at multiple
lines of similar output for "lines" of work. It is visually appeasing
for things to vertically align. A naive use of {shortest(node, N)}
could result in variable length nodes and for the first character of
the description to vary by a column or two.
We implement a function to determine the longest shortest prefix for
a set of revisions. The new function is used to determine the printed
node length for all hg show views.
Testing this will be deferred to a subsequent commit.
.. feature::
show: use consistent node length in views
How about minlen=4? It could be useful in small repos.