view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 33390:32331f54930c

hgweb: re-implement followlines UI selection using buttons

This changeset attempts to solve two issues with the "followlines" UI in
hgweb. First the "followlines" action is currently not easily discoverable
(one has to hover on a line for some time, wait for the invite message to
appear and then perform some action). Second, it gets in the way of natural
line selection, especially in filerevision view.

This changeset introduces an additional markup element (a <button
class="btn-followlines">) alongside each content line of the view. This button
now holds events for line selection that were previously plugged onto content
lines directly. Consequently, there's no more action on content lines, hence
restoring the "natural line selection" behavior (solving the second problem).
These buttons are hidden by default and get displayed upon hover of content
lines; then upon hover of a button itself, a text inviting followlines section
shows up. This solves the first problem (discoverability) as we now have a
clear visual element indicating that "some action could be perform" (i.e. a
button) and that is self-documented.

In followlines.js, all event listeners are now attached to these <button>
elements. The custom "floating tooltip" element is dropped as <button>
elements are now self-documented through a "title" attribute that changes
depending on preceding actions (selection started or not, in particular).

The new <button> element is inserted in followlines.js script (thus only
visible if JavaScript is activated); it contains a "+" and "-" with a
"diff-semantics" style; upon hover, it scales up.

To find the parent element under which to insert the <button> we either rely
on the "data-selectabletag" attribute (which defines the HTML tag of children
of class="sourcelines" element e.g. <span> for filerevision view and <tr> for
annotate view) or use a child of the latter elements if we find an element
with class="followlines-btn-parent" (useful for annotate view, for which we
have to find the <td> in which to insert the <button>).

On noticeable change in CSS concerns the "margin-left" of span:before
pseudo-elements in filelog view that has been increased a bit in order to
leave space for the new button to appear between line number column and
line content one.
Also note the "z-index" addition for "annotate-info" box so that the latter
appears on top of new buttons (instead of getting hidden).

In some respect, the UI similar to line commenting feature that is implemented
in popular code hosting site like GitHub, BitBucket or Kallithea.

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.