🐛 delta breaks git log

[neo-apz]

I'm experiencing an issue when running git log that causes the command to keep producing output and because there are many commits on my branch, the command just keeps printing. It seems no pagination is happening. Everything else works great and only this is causing an issue.

[dandavison]

Hi @neo-apz, delta tries to invoke a pager automatically. By default it tries to use less, but if you have an environment variable set such as PAGER= or PAGER=cat then you'd see the behaviour you describe. Can you post

• your OS
• which less
• env | grep -i pager

I'm converting this to a Discussion because it's not a bug or feature request.

[neo-apz]

Hi @dandavison,

Thanks for the prompt response.

Here are the things you asked for:

• My OS is Oracle Linux 7.
• Initially I was using the default less which was at /usr/bin/less and it was version 458 but when I saw this issue, I tried manually building the latest less from source (608) and now I'm using that which is at /usr/local/bin/less but even with that I have the same problem.
• This is empty (is it normal?)

[dandavison]

Hm. A few things you could try to shed light:

Do these page as expected?

git log | delta
git log | delta --paging=always
git log | delta --pager=$(which less)

These are slightly random tricks to check which less is being invoked by the git process:

GIT_PAGER='which less' git log
GIT_PAGER='less --version' git log

[neo-apz]

I tried all three git log commands and they all worked fine (I had disabled delta in my .gitconfig file before running them) and the two follow-up commands pointed to the latest less version that I installed (so /usr/local/bin/less and 608) was shown.

Then I re-enabled delta in my config file and reran things and now suddenly everything works fine and I have no idea how/why it's working fine now. 😄 🤷‍♂️

[dandavison]

OK cool! All's well that ends well.

[patrickhousley]

In case you are coming here because you are on MacOS and when you run git log, the log just disappears, use brew to update less.

OS: macOS 14.4.1 (23E224)

Before:

> less --version
less 581.2 (POSIX regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2021  Mark Nudelman

After:

> less --version
less 643 (PCRE2 regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2023  Mark Nudelman