bug#62958: [PATCH] Set PAGER=cat in comint.el

[Spencer Baugh]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> From: Spencer Baugh <sbaugh@janestreet.com>
>> Cc: 62958@debbugs.gnu.org
>> Date: Thu, 20 Apr 2023 11:47:42 -0400
>> 
>> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Sorry, this default cannot be universally correct.  You assume that
>> > 'cat' is always available, which is not true on non-Posix platforms.
>> > So at the very least the value should be set according to
>> > executable-find.
>> 
>> executable-find is not correct in the case of "cat" unfortunately,
>> because there are programs (git, for one) which if they see PAGER=cat,
>> just don't start a pager at all, for greater efficiency.  (which is
>> desirable behavior)
>
> Is this about removing the leading directories from the value of
> executable-find?  If so, that is trivial to do, and is not the main
> point of what I wrote.

Yes.  But anyway, the default is nil now, so it should be fine.  Unless
you'd like the custom option of "cat" to not show up on non-UNIX
platforms, somehow?

>> > Should this test that comint-pager is a string?
>> 
>> I don't think that's necessary; doing
>> (if (stringp comint-pager) (list (format "PAGER=%s" comint-pager)))
>> would have unexpected behavior if comint-pager was accidentally set to a
>> non-string; doing
>> (when comint-pager (progn (assert (stringp comint-pager))
>>   (list (format "PAGER=%s" comint-pager))))
>> is a bit verbose and looks weird and is probably not that important.
>
> So we are okay with the user setting the variable to a symbol or a
> list or a vector?

Fair enough, I added a check:

diff --git a/lisp/comint.el b/lisp/comint.el
index 682b555a33c..a145751565f 100644
--- a/lisp/comint.el
+++ b/lisp/comint.el
@@ -258,6 +258,49 @@ comint-input-ring-file-name
                 file)
   :group 'comint)
 
+(defcustom comint-pager nil
+  "If non-nil, name of the program to use as a pager.
+
+If non-nil, comint sets the PAGER environment variable to this
+value before starting a subprocess.  PAGER controls the pager
+that will be used.  If you prefer to not use a pager, you can set
+this variable to \"cat\".
+
+If nil, the PAGER environment variable is not set and the default
+pager will be used.  On Unix systems, typically this is \"less\".
+
+Some programs start a pager before producing output.  A pager
+supports viewing text page by page, so that if the parent program
+produces more output than will fit on the screen, that output can
+be viewed incrementally.
+
+When a program is running under Emacs, this behavior can be
+undesirable, since Emacs itself supports viewing text page by
+page, and a pager requires input from the user before it will
+show more text.  Furthermore, comint is not a full fledged
+terminal emulator, so a pager will typically behave badly.
+
+However, pagers also provide backpressure: They will not consume
+more output from the parent program than the user has actually
+viewed, which on Unix means the output pipe will fill up and the
+parent program will be stopped from producing unnecessary output.
+Many programs (such as \"git log\") take advantage of this by
+producing large amounts of output by default and relying on the
+pager to not consume text that the user doesn't view.
+
+Emacs and comint do not keep track of what text the user has
+viewed, so they can't provide backpressure like a pager does.
+This means users who do not use a pager should be careful to not
+run commands which produce a lot of output.  Users can avoid this
+by limiting the amount of output (such as with \"git log -n10\")
+or by using native Emacs interfaces instead (such as
+`vc-print-log')."
+  :version "30.1"
+  :type '(choice (const :tag "Use default PAGER" nil)
+                 (const :tag "Don't do paging (PAGER=cat)" "cat")
+                string)
+  :group 'comint)
+
 (defvar comint-input-ring-file-prefix nil
   "The prefix to skip when parsing the input ring file.
 This is useful in Zsh when the extended_history option is on.")
@@ -864,6 +907,10 @@ comint-exec-1
         (nconc
           (comint-term-environment)
          (list (format "INSIDE_EMACS=%s,comint" emacs-version))
+          (when comint-pager
+            (if (stringp comint-pager)
+                (list (format "PAGER=%s" comint-pager))
+              (error "comint-pager should be a string: %s" comint-pager)))
          process-environment))
        (default-directory
          (if (file-accessible-directory-p default-directory)