An Improvement to the Behaviour of the Git Pager

First, capture your current git pager settings (in case you want to go back):

git config --list | grep core.pager

Second, configure your new and improved git pager settings:

git config --global core.pager "less $LESS --tabs=2 -RFX"

--tabs=2: Is just right for displaying Ruby diffs

-R: Repaint the screen, discarding any buffered input
-F: Causes less to exit if a file is less than one screens worth of data
-X: Leave file contents on screen when less exits.

If you want to get even fancier consider diff-so-fancy.

Written on May 19, 2017 by alistairmckinnell