Re: 'git log' escape symbols shown as ESC[33 and ESC[m

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Thu, Jan 16, 2014 at 06:29:21PM -0800, Jonathan Nieder wrote:

> > +	/*
> > +	 * We know that "more" does not pass through colors at all.
> > +	 */
> > +	if (!strcmp(pager, "more"))
> > +		return 0;
> 
> I seem to remember that on some systems "more" is the name of the
> full-featured pager that knows how to scroll forward and backward and
> handle color.  (My memory could be faulty.  A search in the makefile
> for DEFAULT_PAGER=more only finds AIX, which is not the platform I was
> thinking of.)

Yeah, my "we know" here was still guessing. According to Yuri, FreeBSD
is the system you are thinking of. :)

> On a stock Debian system "more" is especially primitive, which means
> that it passes colors through, too.  It being so primitive also means
> it is not a particularly good choice for the PAGER setting, though,
> so probably that's not too important.

Yeah, colors do get passed through on Debian. It's possible that other
primitive "more" implementations are OK, too (and certainly we have
defaulted to "on" for them until now).

I think we should make an effort to set MORE=R on FreeBSD. We can
perhaps just set it unconditionally, and assume that primitive "more"
will ignore it. And then assume that "more" will handle colors (either
because of the R setting, or because it is too dumb to escape it).

I can prepare a patch series, but I happily no longer have any antique
systems to test this kind of stuff on.

-Peff