the pager

I've noticed that Git by default puts long output through "less" as a pager. I don't like that, but this is not the time to change established behavior. But while tracking that down, I noticed that the paging behavior is controlled by at least 5 things:

the -p/--paginate/--no-pager options the GIT_PAGER environment variable the PAGER environment variable the core.pager Git configuration variable the build-in default (which seems to usually be "less")

There is documentation in git.1 and git-config.1, and the two are not coordinated to make it clear what happens in all cases. And the built-in default is not mentioned at all.

What is the (intended) order of precedence of specifiers of paging behavior? My guess is that it should be the order I've given above.

Dale