git log output gets directly dumped, without going through a pager-CodePudding

As the GIF above shows, running git log in my WSL2 Ubuntu suddenly became noninteractive. It would show all the logs at once (while the Windows counterpart seemed to be working fine). git has already been updated to the latest version, and this behavior is also present when running WSL2 by itself, i.e., not using the Windows Terminal app. Any ideas on what caused the issue? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

CodePudding user response：

It seems no pager is working on your Ubuntu. Try git -c core.pager=more log or git -c core.pager=less log. It could still not work if more or less is not available. If it works, you can set a global option by

git config --global core.pager less
# or "more", depending on which takes effect

Besides, you can disable the pager temporarily by git --no-pager log.

CodePudding user response：

Following the doc on git config core.pager : check the values of

git config core.pager
echo $GIT_PAGER
echo $PAGER

if none of these values is set, the selected pager should be less (doc says: "the one chose at compile time").

If the pager is indeed less, confirm that less is installed (this is very probably the case: less --version), and then check the environment variables that affect LESS :

env | grep LESS

it could be that some of these options turn off the paging of less.

Finally, if all the values above look like usual values, check if your terminal and tty report correct values (echo $TERM, I just fished stty size from this question, etc ...).

CodePudding user response：

git log is supposed to show a list of all the commits to the repository, so it's working as intended see documentation? Maybe you never noticed it before because your repo was smaller? And now you've got so many commits its freezing? Is it only temporary? (your GIF looks like its piping through a tool like less)

If you don't want this, use some command-line arguments to refine what you are doing.

git log -n 1

Shows only the most recent commit. -n 2 shows the two most recent, and so on...

Many of the windows git tools are wrappers for git, so maybe they do extra stuff which would explain differences in behaviour that you've seen