The procedure to change the pager to less on Windows according to the docs does not work

[AngelEzquerra]

Description

https://jj-vcs.github.io/jj/latest/windows/#pagination says that you can do:

jj config set --user ui.pager '["C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\less.exe", "-FRX"]'

To set the pager to less on Windows. However, that command fails with:

error: unexpected argument '-F' found

Manually editing the config file to set ui.pager to that value works fine.

Steps to Reproduce the Problem

1. Open a Windows Command line
2. Execute: jj config set --user ui.pager '["C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\less.exe", "-FRX"]'
3. You get error: unexpected argument '-F' found

Specifications

• Platform: Windows
• Version: 0.24

[ilyagr]

On Discord, you claimed that the docs suggestion failed for both cmd.exe and Powershell, right? I'm guessing you get different errors depending on which you use.

[yuja]

I have no idea about the parsing rule of Windows shells, but this might be fixed by 3f115cb in a way that invalid TOML expression is reported as an error. (I don't know if the documentation example is valid or not on PowerShell either.)

[AngelEzquerra]

FYI I get the same error with jujutsu 0.25.

[yuja]

Can you check what was written to config.toml? I suspect the value expression would be parsed by the shell, and the resulting TOML expression would got wrong.
It would be nice if someone who use Windows can send a documentation fix.

[emilazy]

AIUI Windows is weird in that cmd.exe doesn’t parse command lines itself, it relies on the program itself to do tokenization (usually by libc, I guess? I assume Rust implements whatever the “standard” syntax is); that seems like it could be relevant here. (I expect PowerShell does something different – I wouldn’t be surprised if it parses the command line and then serializes it back to a string for execution…)