CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitdiffpager
Mike Maxwell
Mike Maxwell

Reputation: 617

git diff: what pager?

When I run git diff on some file, what pager is it using? I ask because for every other command line tool I use with a pager in Linux, when I quit (by typing 'q'), the terminal reverts to what it was displaying before, with the only evidence that I ran s.t. being the command line itself. For example:

> git help diff
>

Same with man, less itself, etc. But when I run git diff, the entire diff remains on the screen, even if it was hundreds of lines long. So if I want to look at the output of previous commands, I have to scroll way back.

This seems to be the behavior of less -X, which "Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal".

I've read the documentation for git diff, but nowhere do I see it say how to restore the terminal to the way it was before I ran the diff. I can export PAGER=/bin/less, but this has no effect (it's maybe the default pager for git diff).

It may be that git diff is somehow passing a -X parameter to less. But if so, I don't see anyway to turn that behavior off (the man page for less is silent about this).

Related: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/167735/can-less-f-be-usefully-combined-with-termcap-initialization. But that doesn't tell my why git diff behaves as if it is passing the -X parameter. (FWIW, my terminal reports that it's xterm-256color.)

Upvotes: 1

Views: 511

Answers (1)

bk2204
bk2204

Reputation: 76499

To see which pager Git is using, you can use git var GIT_PAGER. To find out the order of options that Git consults, you can use run git var --help; the manual page lists the order of options.

Note that by default Git sets some options when invoking the pager by setting some environment variables. The default compile-time behavior is to set LESS=FRX and LV=-c. If you don't want these options, you can override them by setting the environment variable yourself, in which case your settings will override Git's defaults.

Upvotes: 2

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