On Sun, 2004-09-05 at 18:17, David Wilson wrote:
> That's a fair point, but what of the case where we are more than likely
> flooding the user's screen, and here is an obvious and unintrusive way
> of preventing that?
If the value of PAGER is "less", then it's pretty intrusive. "svn log
-r N file" would clear the screen, display one (possibly short) log
message at the bottom of the screen, and would wait for user input
before returning to the prompt.
In your original message, you suggested that we might buffer the first N
lines of data before deciding whether to invoke the pager. We could do
that with a stream filter, but it's still a little intrusive; if the
output of a big command is trickling in slowly, it means I don't see the
output until a screenfull of it is ready.
If we provided this feature as an option, then it wouldn't be intrusive,
but it would be yet another knob which only 1% or fewer users would be
likely to use. And it would be a weird feature which very few programs
have.
I have to wonder if what you really want is a shell feature which pipes
the output of all or selected commands to $PAGER. Then you wouldn't
need to go around convincing every stdout-producing app to add this knob
(not that you've been doing so, but that's the logical conclusion of
your argument). I bet zsh would be happy to add such a feature if it
isn't already present.
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Received on Mon Sep 6 00:33:37 2004