`less -F +G` fills screen when content is smaller than screen

[turbocrime]

in my gitconfig, i sort branches by commiterdate and use less -F +G for the pager

[pager]
	branch = less -F +G
[branch]
	sort = committerdate

i intend this to behave like:

• the latest modified branch appears at the bottom of the list
• if all branches don't fit on screen, the pager shows me the bottom of the list
• if all branches fit on my screen, i'm immediately returned to the prompt

but when all content fits on the screen, less -F +G fills the terminal with the 'null line' placeholder. this means i have to scroll back past tildes to see any previous content. if i just used less -F, then when the list doesn't fit on the screen, i'm at the top (oldest part) of the list instead of the bottom, which isn't useful.

disabling the 'tilde' option doesn't help, because then the screen is filled with blank lines instead of tildes.

this screen-filling behavior happens for any short content, but only when +G is active. you can easily observe:

echo "single line" | less -F +G