Mercurial. Colour output piped to less

Question

Operating system: Mac OS 10.6.2

I'd like to be able to see colour output when piping certain commands through less.

Two examples:

I've got ls aliased to ls --color=auto, so I'd like to be able to see colour when I do this:

ls -l | less

I've also got the color extension turned on in Mercurial, so I'd like to see colour output from:

hg diff | less

and

hg st | less

After some googling, it seems like some versions of less support either -r or -R to make this work, but no dice for me. I can't see anything in the man page that looks like what I need. (-r or -R SEEM to be the right options, but again, they don't seem to work)

Solution 1

For mercurial, you should use the pager extension rather than piping explicitly to less. This will play nicely with the colored output options of other hg commands.

Solution 2

Do:

$ hg diff --color always | less -R

I would alias "less -R" to less. I'm not sure if there's a way to provide default options to mercurial's commands so that you don't have to remember to type --color always for hg diff all the time.

Solution 3

In your ~/.hgrc put:

[extensions]
color =
pager =

[pager]
pager = LESS='FRSXQ' less
quiet = True
attend = outgoing,incoming,diff,status,log,qdiff,blame,annotate,pdiff,glog

Solution 4

I believe you have to use --color=always for ls if you want it to do colors even when not going to stdout. Then use -r on the less command

ls --color=always -l | less -r

Solution 5

If you don't want to use the Pager Extension for mercurial you can use the following command:

hg diff | cdiff

View more solutions

Comments

[jpbochi]

Or use $ hg diff --color always | less -FRSXQ for better less options. It will silently quit if diff fits the screen, for example.

[blueyed]

You can setup LESS="-R" alternatively to aliasing "less" itself.

[Evgeni Sergeev]

-F is to keep reading file as it's being produced, -S is to not line-wrap, -X something obscure, -Q avoids ringing terminal bell.

[einpoklum]

Why the quiet = True part?

[sebastian]

Nice! I recommend LESS='eiFRSXQ' to also quit after reaching EOF and ignore case during search