Subject: Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: Jonathan Nieder <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2014 16:08:12 -0700

Hi,

David Kastrup wrote:
> Jeff King <[email-masked]> writes:

>> There are two questions here:
>>
>>   1. Can less do a better job of indicating what's in the input when -S
>>      is in effect?
>>
>>   2. What should get put into $LESS by default?
>>
>> I was specifically addressing (1). Your comment does not help at all
>> there.
>>
>> It could have an impact on (2), but you didn't say anything besides "I
>> don't like it". That doesn't add anything to the conversation.
>
> No, I said it is useless, which is different from "I don't like it".
> The information is not copy&pastable from a terminal window since it is
> cut off.  It is also useless for review since one does not actually know
> what's in there.  The only thing it has going for it is that it's
> prettier than the actually usable information.

I disagree with your characterization of what's useful here, but it
really doesn't matter.  Why are you still arguing?

I think it would be fine to change git's default for LESS to FRX and
document that change wherever the documentation currently mentions
FRSX, if someone wants to write a patch for it.  (Such a change would
sit in "pu" or "next" until after 2.0.0 is released, of course.)

In the meantime, when you're on machines using the current default,
you have two choices:

 a) set the LESS envvar in your .profile explicitly
 b) hit the two keys '-', shift+S when git opens a pager

The argument about safety is a red herring here, since it's always
possible that a patch will wrap to make new lines with '+' or '-' or
'@@' at the beginning that are equally confusing.

Hoping that clarifies,
Jonathan