pager/`$PAGER` support for `gh repo list`

[laertis]

Describe the feature or problem you’d like to solve

Although there is existing PAGER support both through an environment variable as well as, through gh config for different commands it seems that it is not respected on gh repo list

Based on github cli config.yml

# A pager program to send command output to, e.g. "less". Set the value to "cat" to disable the pager.
pager: cat

Setting pager value to cat should disable pagination

However, when trying to list all repo for an account/organization with more than 30 repos (current pager default value/limit) it won't return all of them (unless you change the limit with -L, --limit)

Proposed solution

Support to disable pagination in gh pr repo list

Related issues

• PAGER support for gh issue/pr list #528
• Extend PAGER support to all commands producing significant output #1630

[mislav]

Hi, PAGER and the general concepts of "pagination" of GitHub data sets are entirely different things.

PAGER is a terminal program that receives data and displays it in a semi-interactive environment, typically to give you more control over viewing its output. One popular pager is less. When PAGER (or the pager gh config value) is set to cat, that means disabling the pager completely and gh command output is just sent to your terminal as-is. Currently, the output of gh repo list correctly goes to a terminal pager, so there is no bug there.

Pagination of data sets in gh is done via the --limit parameter and it controls mostly the maximum amount of data fetched from the GitHub API. If the limit is over 100, multiple API requests will have to be made in sequence before the result can be displayed, and this can be very slow. Our default --limit is thus relatively low and you have to explicitly increase it based on the data set you wanted to fetch. If you wanted to list all repos in an organization that thousands of repositories repositories, you can set --limit 10000, which forces you to remain aware that this can take several seconds to complete.

There is no way to "disable" pagination. To fetch very large sets, supply an even larger number as the limit.

[laertis]

hey @mislav ! Thank for you correction, you 're totally right! I got a bit confused on the way when writing down this issue. Thanks for getting back so quickly and for the clarification once again!

[sgandon]

so to disable it you can do

gh config set pager cat