[PATCH 0/3] improved out-of-the-box color settings

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 09:35:48PM -0500, Jeff King wrote:

Here it is. For those just joining us, the problem is that on some systems, "git log" out of the box produces ANSI codes which are munged by the pager and look terrible. I'm trying to improve that by auto-configuring "more" (to get color in more cases that can handle it), and by dynamically adjusting color.pager's default based on which pager is in use (to turn off color in cases we know won't work).

I was able to test my assumptions about "MORE" on Debian, and adjusted the patches accordingly from the previous discussion. I am still guessing that versions of "more" without "R" will pass through the ANSI codes as-is. That works on Debian. If anybody has an older system to test and report on, I'd love to hear it.

The second patch turns on "MORE=R" only for FreeBSD. Yuri, if you can confirm that my patch works for you, that would be excellent. And if you (or anyone) has access to NetBSD or OpenBSD to test the second patch on, I'd welcome updates to config.mak.uname for those systems.

We also set "LV=-c" along with "LESS". I punted on detecting that in the third patch, as I do not know the exact format of "LV". It looks like just checking for "c" might not be enough, and I need to actually understand the option format (i.e., "-c" or "-dc", but not "-Ac"). I'll leave that to somebody who cares more about LV to improve (with these patches, the behavior for them should remain the same, so it's at least not making anything worse).

  [1/3]: setup_pager: refactor LESS/LV environment setting
  [2/3]: setup_pager: set MORE=R
  [3/3]: pager: disable colors for some known-bad configurations

-Peff