Git – How to Get the Pager to Clean Up Screen Output After Exit

The computer where less scrolled had LESS=-r, the other had LESS=-asXFMMRqix8.

From the less man page:

-q or --quiet or --silent

Causes moderately "quiet" operation: the terminal bell is not rung if an attempt is made to scroll past the end of the file or before the beginning of the file.  If the terminal has a "visual bell", it is used instead.  The bell will be rung on certain other errors, such as typing an invalid character.  The default is to ring the terminal bell in all such cases.

-X or --no-init

Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal.  This is sometimes desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen.

The -X option prevented scrolling all together and the -q option caused the pager to enter a non-scrollable state when scrolling past the beginning or end of file.

My options are now LESS=-asrRix8.

The remaining problem is that git diff still highlights the diff output with colors (as ANSI escape sequences), and expects the pager (i.e. Vim) to display that correctly. But Vim has its own syntax highlighting (also for diffs), and doesn't understand the sequences, so they show up as ugly ^[[m. You have two options:

1. Disable Git's diff highlighting (command-line argument --no-color, but you can also unconfigure that via git config). Now you need to ensure that Vim uses the correct filetype (:set filetype=diff; you can pass that on the command-line via -c {cmd}).

2. Make Vim understand and highlight the ANSI escape sequences; the AnsiEsc.vim plugin can do this.

I'd recommend the first approach.