Re: [PATCH v4] help: colorize man pages

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: May 21, 2021, 20:26 UTC
Message-ID: <YKgXXCvWYI9rjKJT@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <60a7f57fe3301_5503920831@natae.notmuch>

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 01:01:35PM -0500, Felipe Contreras wrote:

> > I still don't understand what we gain by making this a Git feature,
> 
> What do we gain by making `git diff` output color?

Huh? Git is outputting the diff. Who else would output the color?

> > Why would we do that versus saying: if you want to change the colors in
> > the tool that Git calls, then configure the tool?
> 
> Once again... How?

By exporting the environment variables that ask it to do so, just like you showed already?

Show 9 quoted lines

> > If you like to see colors in manpages, why not configure "man" (either
> > by setting these environment variables all the time, or by triggering
> > them in MANPAGER)?
> 
> Let me try that...
> 
>   MANPAGER="less -Dd+r -Du+b -Ds+m" git help git
> 
> It doesn't work.

  ESC=$(printf '\33')
  export MANCOLORS="LESS_TERMCAP_md=$ESC[31m LESS_TERMCAP_me=$ESC[0m"
  export MANPAGER='sh -c "eval $MANCOLORS less"'
  man ls
  git help git

At least on Linux, $MANPAGER is some weird limbo that is not run with the shell, but not just a simple command. Hence the extra layer of "sh".

If I were actually planning to use this myself, I'd probably put it in a "manpager" script in my $PATH and just do MANPAGER=manpager.

-Peff