view mercurial/help/pager.txt @ 38047:dabc2237963c

crecord: fallback to text mode if diffs are too big for curses mode

crecord uses curses.newpad to create a region that we can then scroll around in
by moving the main 'screen' as a veiwport into the (probably larger than the
actual screen) pad.  Internally, at least in ncurses, pads are implemented using
windows, which have their dimensions limited to a certain size.  Depending on
compilation options for ncurses, this size might be pretty small: (signed)
short, or it might be larger ((signed) int).

crecord wants to have enough room to have all of the contents of the main area
of the chunkselector in the pad; this means that the full size with everything
expanded must be less than these (undocumented, afaict) limits.

It's not easy to write tests for this because the limits are platform- and
installation- dependent and undocumented / unqueryable, as far as I can tell.

Differential Revision: https://phab.mercurial-scm.org/D3577

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.