Custom Pagers

Lazygit supports custom pagers, configured in the config.yml file (which can be opened by pressing e in the Status panel).

Support does not extend to Windows users, because we're making use of a package which doesn't have Windows support. However, see below for a workaround.

Multiple pagers are supported; you can cycle through them with the | key. This can be useful if you usually prefer a particular pager, but want to use a different one for certain kinds of diffs.

Pagers are configured with the pagers array in the git section; here's an example for a multi-pager setup:

git:
  pagers:
    - pager: delta --dark --paging=never
    - pager: ydiff -p cat -s --wrap --width={{columnWidth}}
      colorArg: never
    - externalDiffCommand: difft --color=always

The colorArg key is for whether you want the --color=always arg in your git diff command. Some pagers want it set to always, others want it set to never. The default is always, since that's what most pagers need.

Delta:

git:
  pagers:
    - pager: delta --dark --paging=never

A cool feature of delta is --hyperlinks, which renders clickable links for the line numbers in the left margin, and lazygit supports these. To use them, set the pager: config to delta --dark --paging=never --line-numbers --hyperlinks --hyperlinks-file-link-format="lazygit-edit://{path}:{line}"; this allows you to click on an underlined line number in the diff to jump right to that same line in your editor.

Diff-so-fancy

git:
  pagers:
    - pager: diff-so-fancy

ydiff

gui:
  sidePanelWidth: 0.2 # gives you more space to show things side-by-side
git:
  pagers:
    - colorArg: never
      pager: ydiff -p cat -s --wrap --width={{columnWidth}}

Be careful with this one, I think the homebrew and pip versions are behind master. I needed to directly download the ydiff script to get the no-pager functionality working.

Using external diff commands

Some diff tools can't work as a simple pager like the ones above do, because they need access to the entire diff, so just post-processing git's diff is not enough for them. The most notable example is probably difftastic.

These can be used in lazygit by using the externalDiffCommand config; in the case of difftastic, that could be

git:
  pagers:
    - externalDiffCommand: difft --color=always

The colorArg and pager options are not used in this case.

You can add whatever extra arguments you prefer for your difftool; for instance

git:
  pagers:
    - externalDiffCommand: difft --color=always --display=inline --syntax-highlight=off

Instead of setting this command in lazygit's externalDiffCommand config, you can also tell lazygit to use the external diff command that is configured in git itself (diff.external), by using

git:
  pagers:
    - useExternalDiffGitConfig: true

This can be useful if you also want to use it for diffs on the command line, and it also has the advantage that you can configure it per file type in .gitattributes; see https://git-scm.com/docs/gitattributes#_defining_an_external_diff_driver.

Emulating custom pagers on Windows

There is a trick to emulate custom pagers on Windows using a Powershell script configured as an external diff command. It's not perfect, but certainly better than nothing. To do this, save the following script as lazygit-pager.ps1 at a convenient place on your disk:

#!/usr/bin/env pwsh

$old = $args[1].Replace('\', '/')
$new = $args[4].Replace('\', '/')
$path = $args[0]
git diff --no-index --no-ext-diff $old $new
  | %{ $_.Replace($old, $path).Replace($new, $path) }
  | delta --width=$env:LAZYGIT_COLUMNS

Use the pager of your choice with the arguments you like in the last line of the script. Personally I wouldn't want to use lazygit anymore without delta's --hyperlinks --hyperlinks-file-link-format="lazygit-edit://{path}:{line}" args, see above.

In your lazygit config, use

git:
  pagers:
    - externalDiffCommand: "C:/wherever/lazygit-pager.ps1"

The main limitation of this approach compared to a "real" pager is that renames are not displayed correctly; they are shown as if they were modifications of the old file. (This affects only the hunk headers; the diff itself is always correct.)

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