view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 31553:56acc4250900

scmutil: add a simple key-value file helper

The purpose of the added class is to serve purposes like save files of shelve
or state files of shelve, rebase and histedit. Keys of these files can be
alphanumeric and start with letters, while values must not contain newlines.

In light of Mercurial's reluctancy to use Python's json module, this tries
to provide a reasonable alternative for a non-nested named data.
Comparing to current approach of storing state in plain text files, where
semantic meaning of lines of text is only determined by their oreder,
simple key-value file allows for reordering lines and thus helps handle
optional values.

Initial use-case I see for this is obs-shelve's shelve files. Later we
can possibly migrate state files to this approach.

The test is in a new file beause I did not figure out where to put it
within existing test suite. If you give me a better idea, I will gladly
follow it.

Some Mercurial commands 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, the pager extensions uses the environment variable
$PAGER. If neither pager.pager, nor $PAGER is set, a default pager
will be used, typically `more`.

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::

  [pager]
  enable = false

which will prevent the pager from running.