[darcs-users] darcs newbie questions

[Michael Hendricks]

Hi Steffen and Radoslav,

Thanks for your instructive comments.  They both lead me in a
productive direction as I've investigated further.  I'm replying to my
own comments below to document a little more of what I've learned.


On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Michael Hendricks <michael at ndrix.org> wrote:
> Is it possible to colorize diff command output?  I've set
> DARCS_ALWAYS_COLOR=1 and DARCS_DO_COLOR_LINES=1.  The output of `darcs
> whatsnew` has color but `darcs diff --unified` is black and white.
> I'd like for them both to have color.

As Radoslav mentioned, `darcs diff` output is produce by an external
diff utility, so color  in this case shouldn't be affected by
DARCS_DO_COLOR_LINES=1.  Instead, I've added the following to
~/.darcs/defaults

  diff diff-command colordiff -rN -u %1 %2

Unfortunately, per issue 1228[1], this requires the user to press
Enter after each diff.  I've patched away this mandatory interaction
in my local copy of darcs to get the effect I wanted.

> Is it possible for `darcs changes` to use $DARCS_PAGER?  For example,
> if I run `env DARCS_PAGER='less -R -F' darcs changes` the pager is not
> used.  Since that command's output can be very long, automatically
> invoking a pager would be convenient.

Apparently, this feature request has a very long history.  See issue
896 for the full background[2].

> Last question: is it safe for a newbie like me to run darcs-beta day to day?

I've been running darcs-beta for the last few days.  It's been safe so far.

--
Michael

[1]: http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1228
[2]: http://bugs.darcs.net/issue896