Completions should be paged through PAGER when `page-completions` is off
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| bash (Ubuntu) |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
When tab completion sends output through a pager, it seemed to use more. Because less is better than more, I wanted it to use less instead, particularly so I can scroll in both directions.
I initially made /bin/more a symlink to less (which would trigger its more-emulation mode, but that's still better than actual more), but this had no effect. As a result, I consulted the man page for bash. In the section on readline, there is a setting `page-completions` which says that when on (the default), readline will use a built-in more-like pager to page the results. This doesn't specify what happens when it is turned off, but I expected that instead of the built-in pager, it would use an external on, specifically the one specified in the PAGER environment variable. However, it instead simply dumps the results in the terminal.
Please add some way to use PAGER as the pager for completion results.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
Package: bash 4.3-14ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSign
Uname: Linux 4.4.0-75-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Tue May 16 18:42:43 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-04-27 (384 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
SourcePackage: bash
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)
| Mike Doherty (doherty) wrote | #1 |
| description: | updated |
| Nathaniel Beaver (nathanielmbeaver) wrote | #2 |
| Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote | #3 |
| Changed in bash (Ubuntu): | |
| status: | New → Confirmed |
This was brought up previously on the bash mailing list in 2014:
https:/
and then the readline mailing list:
https:/
and elsewhere:
https:/
https:/
https:/
But implementing an external pager is not an easy task, and so far it looks like nobody has done so.
>> I had a look at the source already, realizing that the internal paging
>> mechanism is quite entangled within readline. I even considered trying
>> a patch myself by passing the output to popen() to talk to the external
>> pager.
> I would have to see whether or not a popen-style approach would work with
> applications that want to manage the terminal in other ways, its effect on
> any signal handling applications want to do, and whether or not it would
> work in a callback-oriented application.
https:/