[Practical Git] Navigate git command pager output with Unix less commands

When using a git command that can have a large amount of output (like git log, git diff, or git blame), Git opens the command output in our terminal "pager"; on most modern Unix-based systems, the default pager will be "less". Learning a few less commands will help us deal with this git command output that opens in the pager. In this lesson, we show some of the most useful of the less commands: q (quit), j (down), k (up), Ctrl f(forward), Ctrl b (backward), /{search} (search), and n/N (next/previous search result).

This lesson only covers some of the most critical less commands; there are more commands available. A good chunk of the commands (and "motions") of the Unix pagers are also used by vi (or vim) and other Unix programs.

 

One useful tip when we doing `git log` is search term:

git log  // show the git logs
# We can type '/' to enable search and type term behind '/'
/bug // seach for bug in our logs

And also if you want to nav between the search results, you can do:

# type 'n' go to next result
n
# type 'N' go to prev result
Shift + n