[Avishay Matayev <me@avishay.dev>]

Hi there!

Fugitive[1] is a vim plugin that wraps git and many of its commands
into the editor in a really awesome way, I won't meddle into it too
much as you can read about it in its README, but as you understand, it
uses git, a lot.

Some git commands use a pager, which is usually a program that needs a
pty to function properly (`less`, for example). Fugitive can't really
use a pty for the pager as vim runs its subprocesses without a pty.
Therefore Fugitive just creates its own pager (which is a simple
window in vim) and pastes the git command output there.

The only problem left is that Fugitive can't reliably know when git
decides to use the pager, for example `git reflog show` does raise the
pager while `git reflog expire` does not. Fugitive currently maintains
an (very possibly) incomplete list of commands that need a pager but
maintaining it manually isn't ideal.

I started discussing this on an issue in Fugitive's github page[2] and
Tim Pope (the creator and maintainer of Fugitive, thank you!)
explained that `git` doesn't use a pager if there is no pty so it's
impossible to override its behavior.

We had some ideas how to make this feasible (as you can read on the
thread) but for brevity's sake I'll present the best (IMO) idea:
Essentially, at `pager.c`, don't short-circuit in `git_pager` (or
`setup_pager`?) due to pty absence if a new environment variable is
present, perhaps something like `GIT_PAGER_FORCE` which will override
the `PAGER` and `GIT_PAGER` variables. This will allow Fugitive to
apply custom logic through to pager to know if one exists and present
the window in vim.

I will appreciate any written thoughts on the matter, thank you :)

P.S. I am a complete newbie in regards to mailing lists etiquette,
pardon me if I've done anything incorrect
P.P.S. I CC'd Junio C Hamano because he signed off on (almost?) all
changes to `pager.c`, sorry if that was wrong of me (You probably got
this mail twice because of a misconfiguration, oops)


1. https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive
2. https://github.com/tpope/vim-fugitive/issues/1772