Re: why does git set X in LESS env var?

From: Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org>
Date: Oct 12, 2023, 00:31 UTC
Message-ID: <23cc509bfb433e19c7683c97314e4ac8@manjaro.org>
In-Reply-To: <8f3bec2752f4c2d3ebdd29d20910a4a94f75f608.camel@scientia.org>

On 2023-10-12 02:22, Christoph Anton Mitterer wrote:

Show 31 quoted lines

> On Thu, 2023-10-12 at 02:06 +0200, Dragan Simic wrote:
>> There's also scrollback in the terminal, which can be used to show
>> more
>> of the contents that was displayed before exiting the pager.
> 
> Sure.
> 
>> > Everything that would have come after that is of course not
>> > visible.
>> > The place where I exited may be some "well defined" border, like
>> > the
>> > end of a commit... or anywhere it the middle of a patch (making the
>> > left over remains on the terminal perhaps even ambiguous).
>> 
>> If you didn't select some line or page to be displayed, by scrolling
>> within the pager, it obviously isn't going to be displayed, which is
>> the
>> whole point of using a pager instead of "spitting" the whole contents
>> out at once.
> 
> It's also clear that it's one point of a pager :-)
> 
> But that doesn't change that it's rather a user decision, whether or
> not it makes sense to leave that, what's already been shown by the
> pager, on the terminal after exiting the pager or not.
> 
> I don't think people always select the lines in the pager to some
> reasonable border (e.g. end of a commit, end of a hunk, whatever).
> So it's likely that after leaving the pager, the terminal's scrollback
> buffer will contain something that is not complete and may thus be
> ambiguous.

Makes sense, but please see also my other reply on the list. To sum it up, we can have either the current behavior, the inconsistent behavior, or an even more annoying behavior. I believe that the current behavior is the best choice among these three options.

Show 8 quoted lines

>> That sounds like some issue with your terminal or terminal emulator,
>> which should be debugged and fixed separately.  Such misbehavior
>> isn't
>> supposed to happen at all.
> 
> Are you sure about that?
> 
> Well it happens at least in gnome-terminal, xterm and (KDE) konsole.

Yes, I'm sure, because I'd be fixing that already if that were the case in my environment. :) I use Xfce and its default terminal emulator, though, and I don't know what it's like in other desktop environments and their terminal emulators.

Show 12 quoted lines

>> I see.  Actually, removing "-S" was a good decision, IMHO, because
>> chopping long lines isn't something that a sane set of defaults
>> should
>> do.  Many users would probably be confused with the need to use the
>> right arrow to see long lines in their entirety.
> 
> Sure.
> 
> And having -F is IMO a good default (that virtually everyone would
> want), too.
> 
> With respect to -X, I'm less sure whether it's that clear.

Please see my other response, which explains why having "-FX" is actually a good thing.