Man page paging no longer works

[scop]

Commit 57cc0d843567eef566540074b391f8212d859871 breaks paging in man output. Before that change, the MANPAGER recipe resulted in nice colored and paged man output; after that, the paging is gone.

Adding --paging=always to MANPAGER serves as a workaround, but I'm assuming this is an inadvertent change because it's not mentioned in the changelog and the man recipe has not been updated with this.

I tried updating is-terminal to 0.4.7, but it had no effect on this.

What steps will reproduce the bug?

1. export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"
2. man man

What happens?

The entire man page scrolls through to the end.

What did you expect to happen instead?

Paged output.

How did you install bat?

Built from git.

---

bat version and environment

--diagnostic does not play well with the MANPAGER setup, but here's the raw bat --diagnostic output.

Software version

bat 0.23.0 (e828d78)

Operating system

Linux 5.15.0-67-generic

Command-line

bat --diagnostic 

Environment variables

SHELL=/bin/bash
PAGER=less
LESS=-iMR
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_ALL=<not set>
BAT_PAGER=<not set>
BAT_CACHE_PATH=<not set>
BAT_CONFIG_PATH=<not set>
BAT_OPTS=<not set>
BAT_STYLE=<not set>
BAT_TABS=<not set>
BAT_THEME=<not set>
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<not set>
XDG_CACHE_HOME=<not set>
COLORTERM=truecolor
NO_COLOR=<not set>
MANPAGER='sh -c '\''col -bx | bat -l man -p'\'''

System Config file

Could not read contents of '/etc/bat/config': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Config file

--pager="less -R"
--theme=Dracula

Custom assets metadata

Could not read contents of '/home/scop/.cache/bat/metadata.yaml': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Custom assets

'/home/scop/.cache/bat' not found

Compile time information

• Profile: release
• Target triple: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
• Family: unix
• OS: linux
• Architecture: x86_64
• Pointer width: 64
• Endian: little
• CPU features: fxsr,sse,sse2
• Host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Less version

> less --version 
less 551 (GNU regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2019  Mark Nudelman

less comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
For information about the terms of redistribution,
see the file named README in the less distribution.
Home page: http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less

[sharkdp]

Could this be a duplicate of https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/issues/2572? (or the other way around)

[m-GDEV]

Update

After some more research I found a solution by using MANROFFOPT="-c" as an env variable. Got this from #2568. Wanted to leave this here in case anybody else find it. Thanks.

---

I'm also having an issue with bat not being able to correctly handle man pages.

The paging functionality does work but it seems as if the color functionality does not fully work. Might have something to do with ANSI escape codes.

I've looked into some other issues with the man pager functionality and this seems to come the closest to my issue. I think it might be possible this functionality was also broken in the recent updated.

Here is my manpager env variable:

MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"

Here is the output of man grep:

Here is my bat --diagnostic:

Software version

bat 0.23.0 (871abd27)

Operating system

Linux 6.4.6-arch1-1

Command-line

bat --diagnostic 

Environment variables

SHELL=/bin/bash
PAGER=<not set>
LESS=<not set>
LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
LC_ALL=<not set>
BAT_PAGER=<not set>
BAT_CACHE_PATH=<not set>
BAT_CONFIG_PATH=<not set>
BAT_OPTS=<not set>
BAT_STYLE=<not set>
BAT_TABS=<not set>
BAT_THEME=<not set>
XDG_CONFIG_HOME=<not set>
XDG_CACHE_HOME=<not set>
COLORTERM=truecolor
NO_COLOR=<not set>
MANPAGER='sh -c '\''col -bx | bat --style=plain  -l man -p'\'''

System Config file

Could not read contents of '/etc/bat/config': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Config file

Could not read contents of '/home/musa/.config/bat/config': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Custom assets metadata

Could not read contents of '/home/musa/.cache/bat/metadata.yaml': No such file or directory (os error 2).

Custom assets

'/home/musa/.cache/bat' not found

Compile time information

• Profile: release
• Target triple: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
• Family: unix
• OS: linux
• Architecture: x86_64
• Pointer width: 64
• Endian: little
• CPU features: fxsr,sse,sse2
• Host: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu

Less version

> less --version 
less 633 (PCRE2 regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2023  Mark Nudelman

less comes with NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
For information about the terms of redistribution,
see the file named README in the less distribution.
Home page: https://greenwoodsoftware.com/less