Custom pager breaks diffs or shows a blank screen

[3ino]

I'm on windows and have this in my config.yml
git: paging: colorArg: always pager: delta --dark --paging=never

But the diffs go blank, freeze, and sometimes I get errors when opening diffs, anyone have the same issue or a way to fix?

[sawyershoemaker]

@3ino, this is because custom pagers require a PTY, which isn't currently supported on Windows. However, disabling the custom pager so that lazygit uses the built-in rendering will allow you to view the diffs.

If you really want to run delta on Windows, run lazygit inside WSL where pagers are supported, or rely on delta in your Git config outside lazygit but leave the pager empty inside.

Please feel free to mark this as an answer if it helped, thank you!

[3ino]

Will try, thank you.

[stefanhaller]

@sawyershoemaker I don't think this fully explains it; you are right that custom pagers are not supported on Windows, but configuring one shouldn't have any effect. If it does, it looks like we have a bug somewhere.

[sawyershoemaker]

It did for me; I ended up writing a fix for myself but haven't had the time to read through the docs on what's needed for a good PR.

[stefanhaller]

@sawyershoemaker I'm rather confused. What did the fix consist of, roughly?

I just looked at the code again, and the pager config is only looked at inside the function GetPager, which is only called from the Linux/Mac implementation of newPtyTask. Windows has its own implementation of newPtyTask, which doesn't call GetPager.