Re: [PATCH/RFC] Fix for default pager

From: Tor Arntsen <tor@spacetec.no>
Date: Jun 9, 2010, 09:08 UTC
Message-ID: <AANLkTinAO5empFix9W_rbtU3Vv4O73OsJBtA1stb66DS@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <4C0EB741.9020905@op5.se>

On Tue, Jun 8, 2010 at 23:33, Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Catering to AIX by default seems stupid beyond belief. AIX users today
> are, without fail, accustomed to having to tweak more or less everything
> to make the system run smoothly with modern applications (where "modern"
> is a generous term, including everything that's been written in the last
> 10 or so years).

AIX doesn't come with 'less', because it doesn't really need one. 'more' on AIX can page backwards/forwards in piped data (unlike 'more' on Linux etc.), thus negating the most common need for installing 'less' elsewhere. (The other big feature of less, that it by default clears the screen just as you had found what you wanted to read and were about to apply it to the command line before 'poof' - gone) is so annoying to me that I routinely sets PAGER=more before using Git.

If it's true that Git should demand 'less' to be installed before being usable out of the box.. well, that's just plain silly.

-Tor