view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 41987:c1d83d916e85

revert: option to choose what to keep, not what to discard

I know the you (the reader) are probably tired of discussing how `hg
revert -i -r .` should behave and so am I. And I know I'm one of the
people who argued that showing the diff from the working copy to the
parent was confusing. I think it is less confusing now that we show
the diff from the parent to the working copy, but I still find it
confusing. I think showing the diff of hunks to keep might make it
easier to understand. So that's what this patch provides an option
for.

One argument doing it this way is that most people seem to find `hg
split` natural. I suspect that is because it shows the forward diff
(from parent commit to the commit) and asks you what to put in the
first commit. I think the new "keep" mode for revert (this patch)
matches that.

In "keep" mode, all the changes are still selected by default. That
means that `hg revert -i` followed by 'A' (keep all) (or 'c' in
curses) will be different from `hg revert -a`. That's mostly because
that was simplest. It can also be argued that it's safest. But it can
also be argued that it should be consistent with `hg revert -a`.

Note that in this mode, you can edit the hunks and it will do what you
expect (e.g. add new lines to your file if you added a new lines when
editing). The test case shows that that works.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D6125

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.