Re: pager: consider revisiting automatic LESS=FRX with custom core.pager

>
> On 2026-09-19 at 12:19:40, Francisco Boni wrote:
> > Hi,
>
> Ney,
>
> > There is also an unintuitive distinction between:
> >
> > ```
> > unset LESS
> > ```
> >
> > and:
> >
> > ```
> > LESS=""
> > ```
> >
> > The former causes Git to inject `FRX`, while the latter causes Git to
> > leave the pager environment alone.
>
> Yes, that's because Git sets the environment iff it is unset.  In the
> latter case, it is not unset: it is set to a zero-length value.
>
> > I realize simply removing the default could have substantial
> > compatibility consequences given how longstanding this behavior is.
> > But perhaps it would be worth considering whether the automatic `LESS`
> > default should:
> >
> > * apply only to Git's own default pager path
> > * be suppressible explicitly through configuration; or
> > * otherwise avoid affecting arbitrary custom `core.pager` commands.
>
> We can't know in the general case whether the pager is less or not.  On
> FreeBSD, `more` is less, for instance, and the pager command allows
> arbitrary shell commands, so determining statically which branch is
> taken is not always possible.  Notably, Debian has `sensible-pager`,
> which is the default on that OS, and may (or may not) be less.