Hi!

Apt 2.9.18 introduced an automatic paging feature (which, by the way,
has been requested a while ago in bug #838132 which should be now
closed). It's a nice feature, thanks :D

Still, I think that maybe it shouldn't be enabled by default. In my
experience, new users get very confused by pagers. There are a few
reasons for this:

- They are used to scrolling with their mouse wheel / touch pad. With
  apt's new default paging experience, scrolling with a mouse wheel does
  not work anymore (because of the "X" less option).
- Figuring out how to close the pager is not intuitive. Especially with
  the "X" option, I've observed that newbies don't immediatly realize
  that a new "full screen" program is executing, and that it is catching
  all input.

In short, pagers are great, but only for users who already know how they
work.

I see the following alternative solutions:

1. Disable the pager by default. Easy.
2. Add some logic to handle whether the pager should be started or not.
   For example, apt could check whether the "LESS" (or "MORE")
   environment variable is set and, if so, pipe output to the pager.
   Users who explicitly set the "LESS" variable are more likely to be
   already using a pager.

Let me know what you think! Bye :)

Quoting Andrea Pappacoda (2025-01-19 18:03:35)

3. use a pager which displays to the user how to scroll and how to quit it

4. print that information at the very top of the output shown in the pager

Thanks!

cheers, josch