Turning off the pager in git for the stash command only

Question

I generally like the use of the pager in git, but for git stash the pager annoys me. When calling git stash list, I don't want to be shown the three lines of output in the pager -- it forces me to press q just to make the output unavailable again when typing the folow-up git stash pop command.

One solution would be to use

git --no-pager stash list

but that's to much typing (I'm lazy). Following the man page of git config, I tried

git config --global pager.stash false

but this doesn't seem to do what the documentation says (actually, I didn't notice any effect). Then I tried

git config --global alias.stash "--no-pager stash"

again without any noticable effect.

The configuration gets properly updated, for example

git config pager.stash
false

It just does not have any effect. What am I missing? And how can I achieve that git stash does not use the pager?

Answer 1

It looks like stash, and any other non-builtin command (written as a shell script, rather than in C) misses out on the pager config step. I sent a note to the git mailing list asking about this; it looks like it's a known issue, but not totally trivial to fix.

The primary reason you're seeing no effect from your alias is that git silently ignores aliases for built-in commands; the idea is that you never want to actually make a command inaccessible. For the alias to have a chance of being run, you need to name it something other than stash.

However, I believe that simple aliases are not permitted to affect the environment a git command is run in, which generally includes the options passed to git itself. If I use an alias like yours:

git config alias.foo --no-pager stash
git foo
fatal: alias 'foo' changes environment variables

If you want to do that properly, you'd have to use !git --no-pager stash, so that it'll spawn a subshell and reinvoke git.

Another temporary fix, since it's a shell script, would be to go edit libexec/git-core/git-stash directly. Just go find the list_stash function, and add the --no-pager option to its call to git log, or to cover the whole script, set GIT_PAGER=cat at the top.

Answer 2

As of 1.7.7.3, git config --global pager.stash false accomplishes this.

Answer 3

Alternatively you can configure less to exit if there's less than one screen's worth of output:

export LESS='-F'

Or, verbosely:

export LESS='--quit-if-one-screen'

If you have colours in your git output, you'll probably also want to pass the -r flag:

export LESS='-F -r'

Answer 4

stll = "!git --no-pager stash list"

is your friend.