[darcs-users] Being smart about proffered changes

[Jamie Webb]

On Thu, Nov 09, 2006 at 08:35:35PM +0800, Nimrod A. Abing wrote:
> On 11/9/06, Marnix Klooster <marnix.klooster at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> How about piping into 'less -R' if the hunk is longer than X lines?
> >> Where X might be specified either directly or as a multiple of $LINES?
> >
> >Or use the industry standard *grin* : pipe through $PAGER, defaulting to
> >the "more" binary in your path.  (Windows?)  And perhaps a separate
> >variable DARCS_PAGER_LINES to specify the cut-off X: if the patch is
> >less than X lines, don't call $PAGER.

That doesn't work so well with coloured output. more will leave it
unchanged, but most distributions default $PAGER to less and that
needs the -R option, otherwise it will render the escapes in hex.
Maybe try in order:

- $DARCS_PAGER
- less -R
- $PAGER
- more

Or would it be better to check if $PAGER matches (^|/)less$ and add -R
if necessary?

Windows users are obviously stuck with more unless they go out of
their way.

> The behavior controlled by DARCS_PAGER_LINES can be implemented by
> using LINES since darcs already uses ncurses(?).

Not directly. I would find it very annoying if darcs called the pager
every time a patch is just a little over a page: I'd rather just
scroll my terminal. I see this is as only being useful for much longer
patches.

> LINES is set by
> initscr() so you can use that to automatically determine if a pager is
> needed for the patch. Of course, this breaks if your darcs was built
> --without-curses.

Bash and (I think) zsh also set $LINES, so that shouldn't be much of a
problem. Hopefully csh/ksh are dead by now...

-- Jamie Webb