Mercurial. Colour output piped to less

command linelessmercurial

Operating system: Mac OS 10.6.2

I'd like to be able to see colour output when piping certain commands through less.

Two examples:

I've got ls aliased to ls --color=auto, so I'd like to be able to see colour when I do this: 

ls -l | less

I've also got the color extension turned on in Mercurial, so I'd like to see colour output from:

hg diff | less

and

hg st | less

After some googling, it seems like some versions of less support either -r or -R to make this work, but no dice for me. I can't see anything in the man page that looks like what I need. (-r or -R SEEM to be the right options, but again, they don't seem to work)

Best Answer

For mercurial, you should use the pager extension rather than piping explicitly to less. This will play nicely with the colored output options of other hg commands.

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