Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

>
> Ah, in that case, then I think you'd want to change the logic in esh-var.el so
> that, when 'comint-pager' is nil, $PAGER returns the real value of PAGER from
> the environment. Since this behavior is opt-in, I think it would be enough to
> just make this fix (and ignore the visual command stuff), though special
> handling for visual commands would still be nice to have.
>

I decided to work on this instead of sleeping so I apologize if these
patches are of poor quality.

I still haven't looked into how everything interacts with the visual
commands but it took some real effort (maybe because I'm tired :P) to
get what I got so far and I think it's good enough.

My main pain point was trying to figure out how to maintain the ability
to set/unset the PAGER variable.  These current patches allow you to
set/unset the PAGER variable iff you don't set comint-pager.  It even
allows you to do stuff like 'PAGER=cat git log' (see
eshell-handle-local-variables) without modifying buffer state (as it
should).  Maintaining those capabilities when comint-pager is set seems
very difficult so I gave up.

Trying to setq-local comint-pager in the set function might honestly be
a better user experience for those that set comint-pager but then doing
'PAGER=cat git log' would cause a permanent buffer local change.

So currently everything works 100% great and as expected if comint-pager
is nil.  If comint-pager is not-nil then you cannot set PAGER in a way
that will take any affect.