Mercurial. Colour output piped to less

Asked Mar 27 '10 at 20:37

Active Sep 15 '19 at 07:59

Viewed 1.0k times

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)

edited Sep 15 '19 at 07:59

ifconfig

asked Mar 27 '10 at 20:37

mmacaulay

7 Answers7

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.

edited Aug 16 '16 at 20:17

Luke Schlather

answered Mar 28 '10 at 14:29

richq

1,130

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

answered Mar 27 '10 at 20:44

Brandon Bodnar

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.

answered Mar 15 '12 at 04:11

stantonk

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

answered Mar 22 '12 at 20:19