Hi Avishay On 22/06/2021 23:40, Avishay Matayev wrote:
Hi there! Fugitive[1] is a vim plugin that wraps git and many of its commands into the editor in a really awesome way, I won't meddle into it too much as you can read about it in its README, but as you understand, it uses git, a lot. Some git commands use a pager, which is usually a program that needs a pty to function properly (`less`, for example). Fugitive can't really use a pty for the pager as vim runs its subprocesses without a pty. Therefore Fugitive just creates its own pager (which is a simple window in vim) and pastes the git command output there.
If I understand correctly fugitive is reading the output of the git command over a pipe and putting it into a vim buffer?
The only problem left is that Fugitive can't reliably know when git decides to use the pager, for example `git reflog show` does raise the pager while `git reflog expire` does not. Fugitive currently maintains an (very possibly) incomplete list of commands that need a pager but maintaining it manually isn't ideal.
I don't understand, if as you say above there isn't a pty then git wont use a pager unless GIT_PAGER_IN_USE is set which Fugitive does not seem to, so I'm not sure what you mean by 'Fugitive can't reliably know when git decides to use the pager'
I started discussing this on an issue in Fugitive's github page[2] and Tim Pope (the creator and maintainer of Fugitive, thank you!) explained that `git` doesn't use a pager if there is no pty so it's impossible to override its behavior. We had some ideas how to make this feasible (as you can read on the thread) but for brevity's sake I'll present the best (IMO) idea: Essentially, at `pager.c`, don't short-circuit in `git_pager` (or `setup_pager`?) due to pty absence if a new environment variable is present, perhaps something like `GIT_PAGER_FORCE` which will override the `PAGER` and `GIT_PAGER` variables. This will allow Fugitive to apply custom logic through to pager to know if one exists and present the window in vim.
I note that the latest comment [1] on the github issue talks about a different solution that would cause all git commands to behave as if there was a pty present.
[1] https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive/issues/1772#issuecomment-866401942 Best Wishes Phillip
I will appreciate any written thoughts on the matter, thank you :) P.S. I am a complete newbie in regards to mailing lists etiquette, pardon me if I've done anything incorrect P.P.S. I CC'd Junio C Hamano because he signed off on (almost?) all changes to `pager.c`, sorry if that was wrong of me (You probably got this mail twice because of a misconfiguration, oops) 1. https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive 2. https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive/issues/1772
