aha! I figured out why journalctl's auto-pager bugs me when git's doesn't (and possible solution)

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-10-18 at 10:35 +0200, Enrico Scholz wrote:
> Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org> writes:
> 
> >   - don't auto-page;
> 
> yes; that's the best solution.  The auto-pager is perhaps the most
> annoying feature of systemd.  I have no problem in scrolling back some
> pages in my terminal with shift-pgup, but having a status request block
> (plain 'systemctl' or 'journalctl' request a status) is just broken.

I don't really look at it that way. Let's see, how to put it...

Okay, so with the old system, I don't recall *ever* doing
'cat /var/log/messages'. I always, always either less'ed it or grep'ped
it. So to me it makes sense for journalctl to page by default, because
that's what I always wanted to do with the logs anyway. I guess the
assumption might have been that most people use logs like me, and hence
that's why journalctl is designed the way it is.

Did/do you usually less /var/log/messages? Or did you usually cat it?

> Or, do you want that e.g. the 'ls -l' output gets auto-paged?

Thinking about this case, when I'm doing an ls -l which I know will be
long, I usually wind up trying to order it in such a way that what I
want to see will be at the bottom (classically, ls -ltr)...that doesn't
really work with journals. How about you?
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net