Thanks for the summary! I should point out that I've gotten used to this
feature, so I don't mind it very much anymore (possibly because I've been using
git a lot, although I've noticed that git always uses a pager for the verbose
--help output and never for the terse -h usage summary, and the -h summary
usually fits in 10 or 15 lines, which seems to be a good compromise).

It may be more appropriate for a different bug, but I'll mention that the aspect
of this pager thing which really does bother me about darcs is the inconsistency
of using a pager for other output, specifically when viewing patches with "darcs
changes -i". Sometimes when I hit "y" to view a patch, I then need to hit "q" to
return to the summary, but sometimes when I hit "q" it quits darcs altogether.
Frustrating.

Hi Brian,

Thanks for the comment!  I've created a new bug for this issue.  The underlying
problem, if I understand correctly, is that we're using a viewDocWithPager
function which only triggers when we think the patch is over a screenful.  As
Brian points out, this can be very confusing during interactive dialogues where
you seemingly randomly interleave the behaviour.

I personally vote we remove the use of the pager here, and just
- make the 'p' option work for changes -i
- make the default viewing command never use the pager
- verify that commands that display patches also avoid the pager

This should be very easy for anybody to implement, just swap out one of our
patch viewing functions with another.  It's probably the SelectChanges module
you'd want to look at.

This is fixed since 2.5 (at least).