view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 39814:d059cb669632

wireprotov2: allow multiple fields to follow revision maps

The *data wire protocol commands emit a series of CBOR values.
Because revision/delta data may be large, their data is emitted
outside the map as a top-level bytestring value.

Before this commit, we'd emit a single optional bytestring
value after the revision descriptor map. This got the job done.
But it was limiting in that we could only send a single field.
And, it required the consumer to know that the presence of a
key in the map implied the existence of a following bytestring
value.

This commit changes the encoding strategy so top-level bytestring
values in the stream are explicitly denoted in a "fieldsfollowing"
key. This key contains an array defining what fields that follow
and the expected size of each field.

By defining things this way, we can easily send N bytestring
values without any ambiguity about their order. In addition,
clients only need to know how to parse ``fieldsfollowing`` to
know if extra values are present.

Because this breaks backwards compatibility, we've bumped the version
number of the wire protocol version 2 API endpoint.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D4620

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.