batman hangs when using BAT_PAGER

[docwhat]

If I export BAT_PAGER=less then batman <page> hangs on macOS 13 & 14.

I can see (via PS) it running many copies of bat --language=man... until it hits a fork limit.

At the moment, I can reproduce at will.

[tarneaux]

EDIT: no, my workaround doesn't work with the conky manual, something is wrong with formatting. I ended up just setting $MANPAGER to "$BAT_PAGER" (so not using bat anymore).

Non-working solution

I tried finding a workaround by setting `$MANPAGER` but had some issues with it. Here's what I ended up with:

export PAGER="bat -p"
export BAT_PAGER="less -RF --jump-target=.5" # change to your liking

__myman() {
    man $@ | bat -l man -p
}

alias man="__myman"

For ZSH completion, put this after the autoload -U compinit line in your zshrc:

compdef _man __myman

Meaning "use the man completion for __myman".

[mayersj1]

I can verify the same behavior here on both MacOS Sonoma and NixOS. Unsetting BAT_PAGER allows batman to work properly.

On a side note, setting MANPAGER to anything seems to be ignored.

[eth-p]

That was quite the interesting one to debug. Thanks for finding this!

Fixed in commit 205e9c4.

[eth-p]

Released in v2024.02.12.