Set Your Git Pager Config

Setting up your git pager to your liking can help you navigate diffs and logs much more efficiently. You can set it to whatever pager you like so that your keys feel nice and smooth and your fingers know exactly what to do. You might even gain a few extra features.

Setting the pager

You can set the pager right from your command line with the following command.

git config --global core.pager 'more'

You can also set your pager by editing your global .gitconfig file which by default is set to ~/.gitconfig.

[core]
    pager = more

Color

In my experience you need to turn colors off with nvim. bat handles them and looks good either way, but nvim will be plain white and display the color codes as plain text if color is on.

git config --global color.pager no

Pagers I have tried

Here are some various configs that I tried. For some reason line numbers in bat really bothered me, but when in nvim they felt ok. I am going to try running both of them for a few days and see which I like better. I think having some of my nvim config could be really handy for things like yanking a commit hash to the system clipboard without touching the mouse.

# bat
git config --global core.pager 'bat'

# nvim in read only mode
git config --global core.pager 'nvim -R'

# turn colors off
git config --global color.pager no

# bat with no line numbers
git config --global core.pager 'bat --style=plain'

# nvim with no line numbers and a specific rc file
git config --global core.pager "nvim -R +'set nonumber norelativenumber' -u ~/.config/nvim/init-git.vim"

reset back to the default

If you are afraid to try one of these settings, don't be you can always change it back. If you tried one and dont like it just --unset the config that you just tried.

git config --global --unset core.pager git config --global --unset color.pager

The other option you have is to open your .gitconfig file and delete the lines of config that set your pager.