Re: [PATCH 5/5] add-patch: render hunks through the pager

["Rubén Justo" <rjusto@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 21, 2024 at 03:07:52AM -0400, Jeff King wrote:
> On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 09:45:51PM +0200, Dragan Simic wrote:
> 
> > > Another, ulteriour, motive here behind this suggestion is to
> > > encourage users to work with smaller hunks.  Being able to scroll
> > > around and view lines on demand (i.e. use of pager) is one thing.
> > > Being able to view all relevant lines at once (i.e. not wasting
> > > vertical screen real estate and making things fit on one screen) is
> > > very different and much nicer.
> > 
> > There's another thing to consider, which makes the introduction of
> > "P" as the new option even more desirable.  Let me explain.
> > 
> > With the upcoming changes to the way less(1) as the pager works,
> > which was already discussed at length and even required new features
> > to be implemented in less(1), [1] displaying anything through less(1)
> > will not leave an accessible scrollback in the terminal emulator.
> > Only one screen worth of text will be displayed, even after quitting
> > less(1).  That's what we have to do, to fix age-old issues with the
> > pager-generated scrollback that easily gets corrupted and actually
> > becomes misleading.
> 
> This feature can be annoying even with current versions of less,

Hopefully, reducing the blast radius to a new 'P' option, will make it
palatable.

> depending on your $LESS variable. If you don't set "F" you'll get a
> pager for short inputs, and if you don't set "X" then even small hunks
> are cleared from the screen while we ask about them.
> 
> So this definitely needs to be configurable, and I'd be tempted to say
> it should be off by default, just because we don't know how the user's
> pager will behave when invoked for multiple short snippets like this (it
> might not even be "less", after all).
> 
> I don't think setting pager.add is enough here. You'd also need to set
> pager.checkout, pager.reset, and so on, since their interactive modes
> all invoke the same code. We'd presumably want a single config option
> (and possibly even one that could be set to a distinct pager command for
> this context, rather than the usual one).
> 
> -Peff