how to enable pager like behavior in a shell buffer?

Question

I can't believe I'm saying this, but one thing that is "nice" about windows cmd is the pager. When I do man grep in a bash shell inside emacs buffer it spits out the entire content at once. Is there a way/mode to have emacs buffer to halt outputting text and ask if I want to see more.

Running GNU Emacs 26.1 (build 1, x86_64-w64-mingw32) of 2018-05-30 on "ON NOOO! But can't run anything else" --> Windows 10.

here is what I have for running a bash shell buffer.

  ;;git bash
  (defun git-bash () (interactive)
    (let ((explicit-shell-file-name "d:/Installed_progs/Git/bin/bash.exe"))
      (call-interactively 'shell)
      (setq explicit-bash.exe-args '("--noediting" "--login" "-i"))))

To make it more concrete, here is what I see if I run man grep

The command output filled the entire screen and keeps going until the end of the text.

Here is what I see when I run the same command in win cmd

Pages shows only what fits in one screen and waits. Is there any way to have that type of behavior in a bash shell in emacs?

Answer 1

If you are using EShell the following works: man grep: Add "man" to the list value of eshell-visual-commands and use *man grep instead of man grep at the command line of Eshell.

Background:

• The commands in eshell-visual-commands are started in term-mode which allows paging if the command does do that.

• man has an Eshell-own Elisp implementation eshell/man which calls the usual man command of Emacs. If an Elisp version of a command exists you can enforce calling the external command by prefixing it with a star. Therefore, you need to call *man instead of man in Eshell.

---

git log: Follow the instructions in the documentation of the variable eshell-visual-subcommands:

An alist of the form

((COMMAND1 SUBCOMMAND1 SUBCOMMAND2...) (COMMAND2 SUBCOMMAND1 ...))

of commands with subcommands that present their output in a visual fashion. A likely entry is

("git" "log" "diff" "show")

because git shows logs and diffs using a pager by default.