From: Junio C Hamano Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2026 17:17:31 GMT Subject: Re: make "git --pager/--nopager" work as intended Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <87o6mm2djm.fsf@tweety.afaics.de> Harald Dunkel writes: > Hi folks, > > maybe its neurological, but the current behavior of "git -p" vs "git -P" > makes me feel uneasy. Some commands (like git diff) use a pager by default, > some ues it even without need (git branch), others don't. For every other > git command I run I have the feeling git output is not working as intended. > > Setting core.pager to "cat" is not a solution. It breaks git -p. > > Regards > Harri I am not sure what is being asked here on the subject. As far as I understand, "git -p cmd" and "git -P cmd" do work as intended in that they override the default choice of use (or non-use) of pager, built into each individual command. If you are saying that you disagree with the built-in choice made by some of the commands, perhaps the following snippet from "git help config" may help? pager.:: If the value is boolean, turns on or off pagination of the output of a particular Git subcommand when writing to a tty. Otherwise, turns on pagination for the subcommand using the pager specified by the value of `pager.`. If `--paginate` or `--no-pager` is specified on the command line, it takes precedence over this option. To disable pagination for all commands, set `core.pager` or `GIT_PAGER` to `cat`. So, if you have too many local branches like I do (I seem to have 411 of them as of this writing), [pager] branch = false would probably what you want? With it "git -p branch" would still let me paginate through all 411 local branches, and "git branch" and "git -P branch" would make them scroll away.