Re: "git branch" issue in 2.16.1

From: Paul Smith <paul@mad-scientist.net>
Date: Feb 6, 2018, 20:02 UTC
Message-ID: <1517947345.10111.103.camel@mad-scientist.net>
In-Reply-To: <2412A603-4382-4AF5-97D0-D16D5FAAFE28@eluvio.com>

On Tue, 2018-02-06 at 11:49 -0800, Jason Racey wrote:

Show 8 quoted lines

> After upgrading git from 2.16.0 to 2.16.1 (via Homebrew - I’m on
> macOS) I noticed that the “git branch” command appears to display the
> branch listing in something similar to a vi editor - though not quite
> the same. I don’t know the technical term for this state. You can’t
> actually edit the output of the command, but you’re in a state where
> you have to type “q” to exit and then the list disappears. It’s very
> inconvenient and it doesn’t seem like it was by design. I’m using zsh
> in iTerm2 if that helps. Thanks.

I think you mean that you're in the pager (less(1), most likely). Many/most Git commands that can generate a large amount of output (git log, git diff, git show, etc.) will automatically send the output to a pager so you can scroll through it easily.

The man page for git branch says:

  CONFIGURATION
       pager.branch is only respected when listing branches, i.e., when --list
       is used or implied. The default is to use a pager. See git-config(1).

So, if you never want to use the pager for git branch output you can configure the pager.branch option to set it always off.

Or you can use "git branch | cat" so that stdout is not a terminal :).