Disable Terminal Pagers During Caret Sessions

Many CLI tools (like Git) use a pager such as less for interactive, scrollable output. When Caret runs commands in your terminal, that interactivity gets in the way — the pager can pause on the first page and block progress. You can configure your shell so that when a terminal is spawned by Caret, pagers are disabled and output streams through normally.

How it works

Caret sets an environment variable for terminals it opens to run commands:

• CLINE_ACTIVE — non-empty when the shell is running under Caret

You can detect this variable in your shell startup file and adjust environment variables or aliases only for Caret-run sessions. This keeps your normal interactive terminals unchanged.

Quick setup (Zsh/Bash)

Add the following to your ~/.zshrc, ~/.bashrc, or ~/.bash_profile:

# Disable pagers when the terminal is launched by Caret
if [[ -n "$CLINE_ACTIVE" ]]; then
  export PAGER=cat
  export GIT_PAGER=cat
  export SYSTEMD_PAGER=cat
  export LESS="-FRX"
fi

ℹ️Note

• PAGER=cat ensures generic pager-aware tools print directly to stdout
• GIT_PAGER=cat prevents Git from invoking less
• SYSTEMD_PAGER=cat disables paging in systemd tools (if present)
• LESS="-FRX" makes less behave more like streaming output if a tool still calls it

This configuration only applies when CLINE_ACTIVE is set, so your normal terminals keep their usual interactive behavior.

Verify

• Open a task in Caret that runs terminal commands and check:
  • echo "$CLINE_ACTIVE" prints a non-empty value
  • git log or other long outputs should stream without pausing
• If changes don't take effect:
  • Make sure you updated the correct startup file for your shell
  • Restart VS Code/Cursor so integrated terminals reload your shell config
  • Confirm your terminal profile sources your ~/.zshrc or ~/.bashrc

Optional tweaks

• Prefer command-line options when you don't want to rely on env vars:

# One-off usage (no aliases)
git --no-pager log -n 50 --decorate --oneline
systemctl --no-pager status nginx
journalctl --no-pager -u nginx -n 200
less -FRX README.md

• You can also override paging via shell aliases scoped to Caret sessions using options rather than env vars:

if [[ -n "$CLINE_ACTIVE" ]]; then
  # Make 'less' non-interactive by default
  alias less='less -FRX'
  # Disable paging for common tools via CLI flags
  alias git='command git --no-pager'
  alias systemctl='command systemctl --no-pager'
  alias journalctl='command journalctl --no-pager'
fi

• If you prefer environment variables, many CLIs also respect a generic or tool-specific pager variable:

  • Git: GIT_PAGER=cat
  • Systemd: SYSTEMD_PAGER=cat
  • Man pages: MANPAGER=cat (not typically needed for Caret-driven commands)

• Aliases affect the current interactive shell, while environment variables propagate to child processes. Choose the approach that best fits your workflow.