Pager unnecessarily being used inside neovim terminal

[will]

I just started using jj and am on version 0.25.0.

I noticed when I run jj st in a normal terminal, it prints out the 3 lines just fine without using the pager

❯ jj st
The working copy is clean
Working copy : kmzntksq 13bcd0d8 (empty) (no description set)
Parent commit: uukxwtyk 63a6d071 test

everything there works as I'd expect. But when I run it from within a neovim terminal it sends the same 3 lines through less even when there is more than enough room to just print them to stdout directly.

I'm not sure where to start looking to figure out why this is happening. Has anyone else ran into this already?

[jennings]

less -F causes less to exit if there is less than one screenful of output. jj always spawns the pager (if configured), but less will exit automatically if it can.

I would start investigating this way:

• Is less running when running from the neovim terminal? Or is it some other pager?
• Does another command like echo hi | less -FRX cause less to exit when run inside neovim's terminal?
• Is $LESS set? Is it somehow set differently when running from inside neovim?

[will]

Thanks this got me on the right track. I didn't know less was always called no matter what, but that makes sense.

It turned out to be a confluence of problems that will be unique to me I think.

I had PAGER="less -R" everywhere, both inside and outside of Neovim. However, I happened to have pager = "less -FRX" in the jj config by happenstance because I copied someone's small nix home-manager to get going. So that's why the pager was exiting outside of neovim.

Inside of neovim, I run it in a sandbox and it can't access ~/Library amongst other things, and apparently that's where the config file ends up instead of the xdg ~/.config directories on macOS. Probably no one else in the world is sandboxing their neovim on macOS like I am, so won't run into this problem.