Bug?: disabling paging is impossible without overriding the pager

[vn971]

Currently, it is possible to disable paging in CLI via bat --paging=never. To make this configuration global, the help page / man pages suggest overriding the pager environment variable, BAT_PAGER. However, this behavior seems to be error-prone:

If BAT_PAGER is overridden, it is hard to "fix" it in CLI. Normally, env variables are overridden by CLI keys. E.g. with the standard CLI conventions, if you have BAT_PAGING=never and you'd run bat --paging-never, you'd get paging. With the current version of bat (0.23.0 (871abd27)), this is impossible.

This might be low-prio because I'm actually intending to set bat to non-paging mode by default and may not even switch back. I'm leaving this to the author's discretion. I'm also not sure if the issue is a "bug" (inconsistency with the standard CLI conventions), or simply a feature request. Triaging is welcomed

Thanks for the nice tool! ❤️

[YeungOnion]

Just to get a sense of this, would an alias with --no-paging not be suitable for your use case? I'd expect the need for paging/no-paging to be related to using an interactive shell as cat seems a better used tool if there's not a user involved.

[vn971]

@YeungOnion do you mean an alias with --paging=never? That does definitely help and that is what I'm currently doing locally. bat can do much more than cat even without paging: syntax highlight, line numbers and overall formatting just to name a few

[YeungOnion]

Ah, you're right and that's what I meant. I'm thinking now that I just have too strong a preference that environment variables are a user's responsibility.