Package: apt Version: 2.9.18 Severity: wishlist Hi!
Apt 2.9.18 introduced an automatic paging feature (which, by the way, has been requested a while ago in bug #838132 which should be now closed). It's a nice feature, thanks :D
Still, I think that maybe it shouldn't be enabled by default. In my experience, new users get very confused by pagers. There are a few reasons for this:
- They are used to scrolling with their mouse wheel / touch pad. With apt's new default paging experience, scrolling with a mouse wheel does not work anymore (because of the "X" less option). - Figuring out how to close the pager is not intuitive. Especially with the "X" option, I've observed that newbies don't immediatly realize that a new "full screen" program is executing, and that it is catching all input.
In short, pagers are great, but only for users who already know how they work.
I see the following alternative solutions: 1. Disable the pager by default. Easy.2. Add some logic to handle whether the pager should be started or not. For example, apt could check whether the "LESS" (or "MORE") environment variable is set and, if so, pipe output to the pager. Users who explicitly set the "LESS" variable are more likely to be already using a pager.
Let me know what you think! Bye :)
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