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.