# Pager Support

Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant.

To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable:

    [pager]
    pager = less -FRX

If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will be used, typically less on Unix and more on Windows.

On Windows, more is not color aware, so using it effectively disables color. MSYS and Cygwin shells provide less as a pager, which can be configured to support ANSI color codes. See `hg help config.color.pagermode` to configure the color mode when invoking a pager.

You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the pager.ignore list:

    [pager]
    ignore = version, help, update

To ignore global commands like `hg version` or `hg help`, you have to specify them in your user configuration file.

To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command, you can use --pager=<value>:

> - use as needed: auto.
> - require the pager: yes or on.
> - suppress the pager: no or off (any unrecognized value will also work).

To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set:

    [ui]
    paginate = never

which will prevent the pager from running.