view mercurial/helptext/pager.txt @ 47072:4c041c71ec01

revlog: introduce an explicit tracking of what the revlog is about

Since the dawn of time, people have been forced to rely to lossy introspection
of the index filename to determine what the purpose and role of the revlog they
encounter is. This is hacky, error prone, inflexible, abstraction-leaky,
<insert-your-own-complaints-here>.

In f63299ee7e4d Raphaël introduced a new attribute to track this information:
`revlog_kind`. However it is initialized in an odd place and various instances
end up not having it set. In addition is only tracking some of the information
we end up having to introspect in various pieces of code.

So we add a new attribute that holds more data and is more strictly enforced.
This work is done in collaboration with Raphaël.

The `revlog_kind` one will be removed/adapted in the next changeset. We expect
to be able to clean up various existing piece of code and to simplify coming
work around the newer revlog format.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D10352

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.