🚀 Don't always page with --navigate option.

[kevinhwang91]

When the output of git diff is shorter than the screen lines, delta always pages the output.

[Kr1ss-XD]

Well, it doesn't always page the output; you can control this behavior with the options for less (assuming that less is configured as your pager), e.g.

LESS=F git diff

E/ or (which means the same as above)

LESS=--quit-if-one-screen git diff

[kevinhwang91]

It doesn't work for me.

GIT_PAGER='delta --navigate' LESS=F git diff

[Kr1ss-XD]

Whoops sorry... I overlooked you were referring to --navigate. My bad.

[dandavison]

Thanks @kevinhwang91 and @Kr1ss-XD, I noticed this also and was disappointed by it. I think that this is a problem with less, not with delta. Note that delta --navigate is implemented by delta starting a less process passing --pattern=<some regex>. When delta is in --navigate mode, it doesn't change anything about the way it usually invokes less, other than passing --pattern <regex> (and setting the LESSANSIENDCHARS env var to mK).

But see e.g. see https://superuser.com/questions/951405/less-with-f-option-and-pattern-matching, or experiment with piping input to less --pattern --quit-if-one-screen. It seems that less fills the screen with these lines if given short input and --pattern.

So, the question is -- can anyone come up with a cat myfile.txt | less --pattern ... invocation that behaves the way they would like? If not, then this might have to be solved in less, if that is possible. I don't know any sane way to implement delta --navigate other than via less --pattern.

[Kr1ss-XD]

@dandavison not sure if you can use that, but

LESS=XE less --pattern=$pattern <short_file>

does exit from less if short_file fits into the screen.

E/ but it skips the text before the first occurence of $pattern...

[kevinhwang91]

It seems that I shouldn't use --navigate option until this issue was solved. Honestly, I hate to fill the screen after invoking delta.

@dandavison You can close this issue if you want.

[kevinhwang91]

#237 has discussed this issue.

[ronjouch]

This thread helped me realize what was wrong in my config, and causing --paging=auto to fail, printing these ~ characters and failing to not page in short diffs: I configure my less with LESS='-M +Gg', for less to display in its status bar a percentage of where I'm in the file. So, keeping this as-is because it's helpful when lessing a big file, e.g. a log, but overriding it with LESS=F in my diff alias.

Thanks for the discussion, everybody.

EDIT one more tweak: keep preserving my status bar with percentage (LESS='-M +Gg') when the diff is bigger than a screenful. Here's my updated d alias from my .gitconfig:

d = "!git status -s && if [ $(git --no-pager diff | wc -l) -gt $(tput lines) ]; then ENVVAR='THEVOID=yes'; else ENVVAR='LESS=F'; fi && echo && env $ENVVAR git diff"

[dandavison]

It seems that I shouldn't use --navigate option until this issue was solved

@kevinhwang91 I don't have a proper solution yet but one nice thing is that we can easily toggle navigate on/off like this:

git config --global delta.navigate true

I'm finding that makes it fairly convenient to activate when appropriate (e.g. for git log -p or a commit you know has many files & hunks). Of course, one could also create shell functions/aliases doing something similar.

[dandavison]

The latest release of delta allows navigate to be activated via an environment variable, e.g.:

DELTA_NAVIGATE=1 git diff

This is motivated by the fact that leaving navigate active all the time is problematic; please see the README section https://github.com/dandavison/delta#navigation-keybindings-for-large-diffs

[dandavison]

In addition to the DELTA_NAVIGATE env var, git -c ... can now be used with all delta options. I think this is an improvement in our abilities to configure delta on-the-fly. So here for example,

git -c delta.navigate=true log -p
git -c delta.navigate=false log -p

This requires delta 0.6.0.