[Bug 1691314] Re: Completions should be paged through PAGER when `page-completions` is off

[Nathaniel Beaver]

This was brought up previously on the bash mailing list in 2014:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-bash/2014-03/msg00017.html

and then the readline mailing list:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2014-03/msg00044.html

and elsewhere:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2014/04/msg00138.html

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26257724/set-less-as-pager-in-psql

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/158269/can-we-use-something-
better-than-more-for-tab-completion

But implementing an external pager is not an easy task, and so far it
looks like nobody has done so.

>> I had a look at the source already, realizing that the internal paging
>> mechanism is quite entangled within readline.  I even considered trying
>> a patch myself by passing the output to popen() to talk to the external
>> pager.
> I would have to see whether or not a popen-style approach would work with
> applications that want to manage the terminal in other ways, its effect on
> any signal handling applications want to do, and whether or not it would
> work in a callback-oriented application.

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2014-03/msg00046.html

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1691314

Title:
  Completions should be paged through PAGER when `page-completions` is
  off

Status in bash package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  When tab completion sends output through a pager, it seemed to use
  more. Because less is better than more, I wanted it to use less
  instead, particularly so I can scroll in both directions.

  I initially made /bin/more a symlink to less (which would trigger its
  more-emulation mode, but that's still better than actual more), but
  this had no effect. As a result, I consulted the man page for bash. In
  the section on readline, there is a setting `page-completions` which
  says that when on (the default), readline will use a built-in more-
  like pager to page the results. This doesn't specify what happens when
  it is turned off, but I expected that instead of the built-in pager,
  it would use an external on, specifically the one specified in the
  PAGER environment variable. However, it instead simply dumps the
  results in the terminal.

  Please add some way to use PAGER as the pager for completion results.

  ProblemType: Bug
  DistroRelease: Ubuntu 16.04
  Package: bash 4.3-14ubuntu1.1
  ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.4.0-75.96-generic 4.4.59
  Uname: Linux 4.4.0-75-generic x86_64
  ApportVersion: 2.20.1-0ubuntu2.5
  Architecture: amd64
  CurrentDesktop: Unity
  Date: Tue May 16 18:42:43 2017
  InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-04-27 (384 days ago)
  InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS "Xenial Xerus" - Release amd64 (20160420.1)
  SourcePackage: bash
  UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

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