Re: "Read my lips: no more merges" - aka Linux 2.6.14-rc1

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org> writes:

No, you read my message wrong, or I failed to describe it properly.

sensible-pager is just an indirection that uses your preferred pager. This will usually be less, but if a user prefers to use e.g. "w3m" (or "more") that can be done by reconfiguring a symlink (using the update-alternatives program, or even a GUI such as galternatives).

So no, they haven't replaced less with sensible-pager. They just provided another way to select which pager you want. Setting $PAGER will still work the trick.

Running "sensible-pager" will check $PAGER an run that if set, otherwise run the pager selected via the alternatives sytem, which will usually be "less". The alternatives selection is done with a symlink called "/usr/bin/pager".

The advantage is, I guess, consistency. Different programs don't have to encode their own default pager.

To summarize: on a Debian system with "less" as the preferred pager, these four invokations are equal:

  $ ${PAGER:-less}
  $ sensible-pager
  $ pager
  $ less

If you set $PAGER to something else, the first two variants will run $PAGER, while the last two will still run "less".