Some Mercurial commands 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, the pager extensions uses the environment variable $PAGER. If neither pager.pager, nor $PAGER is set, a default pager will be used, typically `more`. 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).