Re: the pager

From: Dale R. Worley <worley@alum.mit.edu>
Date: Sep 3, 2013, 02:37 UTC
Message-ID: <201309030237.r832bjZp014060@freeze.ariadne.com>
In-Reply-To: <201308261957.r7QJvfjF028935@freeze.ariadne.com>

Show 10 quoted lines

> 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")

One complication is the meaning of -p/--no-pager:

With the remaining sources, we assume that there is a priority sequence, and that is used to determine what the pager is.

There is a somewhat independent question of when the pager is activated. What I know so far is that some commands use the pager by default and some by default do not. My expectation is that --no-pager can be used to suppress the pager for *any* command. Is it also true that -p can force the pager for *any* command, or are there commands which will not page even with -p?

I assume that if -p is specified but the "which pager" selection is "cat" (or some other specification of no pager), then there is no paging operation.

Dale