[PATCH] builtin-help: fallback to GIT_MAN_VIEWER before man

[PATCH] builtin-help: fallback to GIT_MAN_VIEWER before man

[Romain Francoise]

In some situations it is useful to be able to switch viewers via the
environment, e.g. in Emacs shell buffers.  So check the GIT_MAN_VIEWER
environment variable and try it before falling back to "man".

Signed-off-by: Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>
---

The motivation for this is that I want the viewer to be "woman" in
Emacs shell buffers and "man" otherwise, and having an environment
variable (like PAGER or EDITOR) is cleaner than using a
man.viewer.cmd wrapper to do the redirection.

 Documentation/git-help.txt |    4 +++-
 builtin-help.c             |    3 +++
 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

diff --git a/Documentation/git-help.txt b/Documentation/git-help.txt
index f414583..d9b9c34 100644
--- a/Documentation/git-help.txt
+++ b/Documentation/git-help.txt
@@ -112,7 +112,9 @@ For example, this configuration:
 will try to use konqueror first. But this may fail (for example if
 DISPLAY is not set) and in that case emacs' woman mode will be tried.
 
-If everything fails the 'man' program will be tried anyway.
+If everything fails, or if no viewer is configured, the viewer specified
+in the GIT_MAN_VIEWER environment variable will be tried.  If that
+fails too, the 'man' program will be tried anyway.
 
 man.<tool>.path
 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
diff --git a/builtin-help.c b/builtin-help.c
index 721038e..64207cb 100644
--- a/builtin-help.c
+++ b/builtin-help.c
@@ -361,12 +361,15 @@ static void show_man_page(const char *git_cmd)
 {
 	struct man_viewer_list *viewer;
 	const char *page = cmd_to_page(git_cmd);
+	const char *fallback = getenv("GIT_MAN_VIEWER");
 
 	setup_man_path();
 	for (viewer = man_viewer_list; viewer; viewer = viewer->next)
 	{
 		exec_viewer(viewer->name, page); /* will return when unable */
 	}
+	if (fallback)
+		exec_viewer(fallback, page);
 	exec_viewer("man", page);
 	die("no man viewer handled the request");
 }
-- 
1.6.0.1.141.g445ca.dirty

Re: [PATCH] builtin-help: fallback to GIT_MAN_VIEWER before man

[Junio C Hamano]

Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com> writes:

> In some situations it is useful to be able to switch viewers via the
> environment, e.g. in Emacs shell buffers.  So check the GIT_MAN_VIEWER
> environment variable and try it before falling back to "man".
>
> Signed-off-by: Romain Francoise <romain@orebokech.com>
> ---
>
> The motivation for this is that I want the viewer to be "woman" in
> Emacs shell buffers and "man" otherwise, and having an environment
> variable (like PAGER or EDITOR) is cleaner than using a
> man.viewer.cmd wrapper to do the redirection.

Obviously I am biased, as I am among the people who have PAGER=cat and
EDITOR=emacsclient, and 70% of whose command invocation is from within the
"M-x compile", but I like this.