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5

Can I get less not to monochrome its output?

E.g., the output from git diff is colored, but git diff | less is not.

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3 Answers

up vote 21 down vote accepted

Use:

git diff --color=always | less -r

--color=always is there to tell git to output color codes even if the output is a pipe (not a tty). And -r is there to tell less to interpret those color codes and other escape sequences. Use -R for ANSI color codes only.

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Excellent! Can I translate this to a "git config --global" command? – ripper234 Aug 24 '11 at 12:23
@ripper234. With recent gits, git config color.ui true should be enough to obtain colored output, and to automatically run a pager for long outputs. – Stéphane Gimenez Aug 24 '11 at 12:48
True enough, I was actually using something similar but not quite like it. Thanks anyway for the great answer. – ripper234 Aug 24 '11 at 13:20
@ripper234 you can set an alias for this: unix.stackexchange.com/a/50007/24272 – AvL Oct 5 '12 at 8:23
up vote 5 down vote

Use -r (--raw-control-chars) option to less, or also -R (only ANSI escape sequences).

I have an alias for this in ~/.bashrc

alias rless='less -r'
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Actually I just did alias less='less -r'. Any reason not to? – ripper234 Aug 24 '11 at 12:25
@ripper234: I vaguely remember there could be cases when using -r when not needed can lead to visualization problem. – enzotib Aug 24 '11 at 12:29
For instance, when you pipe ack with less -r you lose a carriage return – NewAlexandria Jan 14 at 15:58
up vote 0 down vote

Another option would be to enable colors and use 'less -r' as your pager.

git config --global color.ui true
git config --global core.pager 'less -r'

This results in

[color]
    ui = true
[core]
    pager = less -r

in your ~/.gitconfig

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