Tags: patch


Paging is useless and annoying in comint-derived commands such as
async-shell-command and M-x shell.  It is a frequent footgun for new
Emacs users when they try to run commands which start a pager in such
modes.  I know a number of users who set PAGER=cat in their Emacs to
avoid it.

Simply adding (setenv "PAGER" "cat") globally is not correct, since
that will break modes like term, which support paging quite well.
It's only and exactly the comint-derived modes which don't need
paging.

Changing the default to "cat" in this way might be a bit
controversial...

In GNU Emacs 29.0.60 (build 3, x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, X toolkit, cairo
 version 1.15.12, Xaw scroll bars) of 2023-03-13 built on
 igm-qws-u22796a
Repository revision: e759905d2e0828eac4c8164b09113b40f6899656
Repository branch: emacs-29
Windowing system distributor 'The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.12011000
System Description: CentOS Linux 7 (Core)

Configured using:
 'configure --with-x-toolkit=lucid --with-modules
 --with-gif=ifavailable'