view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 37007:143219fc2620

debugcommands: introduce actions to perform deterministic reads

"readavailable" is useful as a debugging device to see what data is
available on a pipe. But the mechanism isn't deterministic because
what's available on a pipe is highly conditional on timing, system
load, OS behavior, etc. This makes it not suitable for tests.

We introduce "ereadline," "read," and "eread" for performing
deterministic I/O operations (at least on blocking file descriptors).

We stop short of converting existing consumers of "readavailable"
in tests because we're working out race conditions and deadlocks
on Windows. But the goal is to eventually move tests away from
"readavailable" to these new APIs.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D2720

Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will
attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant.

To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable::

  [pager]
  pager = less -FRX

If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the
environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default
or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will
be used, typically `less` on Unix and `more` on Windows.

.. container:: windows

  On Windows, `more` is not color aware, so using it effectively disables color.
  MSYS and Cygwin shells provide `less` as a pager, which can be configured to
  support ANSI color codes.  See :hg:`help config.color.pagermode` to configure
  the color mode when invoking a pager.

You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the
pager.ignore list::

  [pager]
  ignore = version, help, update

To ignore global commands like :hg:`version` or :hg:`help`, you have
to specify them in your user configuration file.

To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command,
you can use --pager=<value>:

  - use as needed: `auto`.
  - require the pager: `yes` or `on`.
  - suppress the pager: `no` or `off` (any unrecognized value
    will also work).

To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set::

  [ui]
  paginate = never

which will prevent the pager from running.