New updates to repo disable pager

[solkaz]

I noticed that new updates to the repo added the --no-pager flag to most aliases. Is there a reason for changing this? At least I would like to have an alternative that uses the pager.

[davidde]

Oh ok, that's totally understandable. I haven't used the pager in a long time, so I wrongly assumed no one did anymore. I'll revert back the l aliases to use use the pager, and keep the ls aliases with --no-pager if that works for you?

I am kinda in the middle of reorganizing the repo to add support for powershell and nushell, so just let me know if I've removed other functionality that you value.

[davidde]

So I reverted the list commands for tags and stashes to use the pager again in d5feead, but I've noticed this is only a small part of the --no-pager changes. I'm now assuming you rather meant specifically git show, git diff and git log, rather then the simpler ls/list aliases?

It would be more difficult to add duplicate commands for both with and without the --no-pager flag for all those commands ...

Honestly, I've never really understood the value these ancient pagers bring. Could you try to communicate to me what you like about it specifically? If you really would like to keep using the pager with those commands, I guess I could make it user configurable to choose pager/ no pager up front.

[solkaz]

@davidde yes, I was concerned about git log specifically, but show and diff would benefit as well. Without pagers, running just git log means the entire repo's commit history is printed to the terminal, which is simply unusable for basically all projects. Same goes for the other two commands; when the output is long, then it becomes somewhat unwieldy to use these commands without a pager. It's possible to disable pagers by running git config --global core.pager "cat", so users that don't want this can simply set that (though I believe this would remove color highlighting)

[davidde]

Do you mean you use the pagers to search interactively in the output? I generally just specify the command such that the output isn't huge... Plus scrolling in the terminal view is really fast, while scrolling in the pagers is a snail's pace in comparison... Am I missing something here, or is it just the missing interactive search that makes it unusable for you?

The basic git log plugin command limits the output to just the last 10 commits for exactly that reason (making it more manageable).

You are totally right however. It seems git config --global core.pager "cat" does exactly what I'm after with --no-pager. Personally, I really dislike the constant context switching in and out of pagers. So I will make core.pager "cat" my default, and revert all --no-pager flags. This is a much better solution. Thank you for bringing my attention to it.