bat: Default pager breaks colours in Windows Terminal

Hi, I’ve run into a bug in less that effectively breaks bat in the new Windows Terminal. I appreciate that this is not bat’s fault, but I’m reporting it here to save other people the investigation time.

Bug

When calling bat in PowerShell in Windows Terminal, it breaks subsequent colouring in the terminal and makes it unusable (at least with my colour scheme) until the terminal is relaunched:

Details

This occurs for me in PowerShell (7 and 5.1) in Windows Terminal, it does not occur in the old Windows PowerShell application.

I believe this is due to a bug in version 551 of the less pager, which is installed by default with the bat Chocolatey package. The issue has been fixed in less source, but it’s not available via Windows package managers yet.

Short-term workaround

I was able to fix the issue by compiling version 554 of less, using the MinGW compilation instructions here.

Long-term fix

Wait for a newer version of less to be released via Chocolatey and Scoop.

What version of bat are you using? bat 0.12.1 and less 551

How did you install bat? Chocolatey

Windows 10 1909

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 4 years ago
Reactions: 3
Comments: 24 (9 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

@ofek I made a PR for scoop

https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/pull/1108

jftuga on May 20, 2020

Chocolatey is now using my version of less:

https://chocolatey.org/packages/Less

jftuga on May 20, 2020

I have built less version 560 binaries for Windows. I have also documented the complete build process here:

https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows

As a workaround, I have had good luck with really old versions of less.exe such as version 429 by setting the following environment variable:

BAT_STYLE=numbers,plain

Please note that this workaround is unnecessary for binary I am distributing in my GitHub repo.

jftuga on May 6, 2020

Thank you for the detailed bug report!

We can keep this open until it has been fixed in the Chocolatey package. Apart from that, I don’t think there is anything we can do here except to suggest an (obvious) workaround, which would be to put --paging=never in bats config file (bat --config-file):

# Disable paging
--paging=never

sharkdp on Mar 10, 2020

I can confirm that this is fixed with Chocolatey and bat 0.15.1 along with less 561. This was tested by using a fresh install of bat via Chocolatey.

jftuga on May 21, 2020

I updated my binary version of less tov560 which fixes an issue where colors were not being properly displayed under v557.

https://github.com/jftuga/less-Windows

jftuga on May 6, 2020

@sharkdp less no longer provides binaries 🙁

ofek on May 4, 2020

I have messaged the Chocolatey less maintainer with the link to my repo.

https://chocolatey.org/packages/Less#discussion

jftuga on May 11, 2020

@jftuga I’m using your builds, thanks!

ofek on May 11, 2020

less 557 has been recently released as a beta: http://greenwoodsoftware.com/less/download.html The release notes mention “Fix display bug in WIN32C version.”

Chocolatey:

bat package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/Bat
less package: https://chocolatey.org/packages/Less (currently still 551)

Scoop:

bat package: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/blob/master/bucket/bat.json
less package: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Main/blob/master/bucket/less.json (currently still 551)

sharkdp on Apr 30, 2020