Some Mercurial commands can produce a lot of output, and Mercurial will attempt to use a pager to make those commands more pleasant. To set the pager that should be used, set the application variable:: [pager] pager = less -FRX If no pager is set in the user or repository configuration, Mercurial uses the environment variable $PAGER. If $PAGER is not set, pager.pager from the default or system configuration is used. If none of these are set, a default pager will be used, typically `less` on Unix and `more` on Windows. .. container:: windows On Windows, `more` is not color aware, so using it effectively disables color. MSYS and Cygwin shells provide `less` as a pager, which can be configured to support ANSI color codes. See :hg:`help config.color.pagermode` to configure the color mode when invoking a pager. You can disable the pager for certain commands by adding them to the pager.ignore list:: [pager] ignore = version, help, update To ignore global commands like :hg:`version` or :hg:`help`, you have to specify them in your user configuration file. To control whether the pager is used at all for an individual command, you can use --pager=: - use as needed: `auto`. - require the pager: `yes` or `on`. - suppress the pager: `no` or `off` (any unrecognized value will also work). To globally turn off all attempts to use a pager, set:: [ui] paginate = never which will prevent the pager from running.