Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 24, 2014, 23:08 UTC
Message-ID: <20140424230812.GM15516@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <87ha5i9wkp.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>

Hi,

David Kastrup wrote:

> Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 18 quoted lines

>> There are two questions here:
>>
>>   1. Can less do a better job of indicating what's in the input when -S
>>      is in effect?
>>
>>   2. What should get put into $LESS by default?
>>
>> I was specifically addressing (1). Your comment does not help at all
>> there.
>>
>> It could have an impact on (2), but you didn't say anything besides "I
>> don't like it". That doesn't add anything to the conversation.
>
> No, I said it is useless, which is different from "I don't like it".
> The information is not copy&pastable from a terminal window since it is
> cut off.  It is also useless for review since one does not actually know
> what's in there.  The only thing it has going for it is that it's
> prettier than the actually usable information.

I disagree with your characterization of what's useful here, but it really doesn't matter. Why are you still arguing?

I think it would be fine to change git's default for LESS to FRX and document that change wherever the documentation currently mentions FRSX, if someone wants to write a patch for it. (Such a change would sit in "pu" or "next" until after 2.0.0 is released, of course.)

In the meantime, when you're on machines using the current default, you have two choices:

 a) set the LESS envvar in your .profile explicitly
 b) hit the two keys '-', shift+S when git opens a pager

The argument about safety is a red herring here, since it's always possible that a patch will wrap to make new lines with '+' or '-' or '@@' at the beginning that are equally confusing.

Hoping that clarifies, Jonathan