[BUG] `console.Console.pager` not respecting `PAGER`

Describe the bug Rich’s build in pager does not seem to respect PAGER on my machine, and behaves inconsistenly compared to using less manually.

To Reproduce

"""rich_pager_debug.py"""
from rich import console

rich_console = console.Console(color_system="standard")
text = "[red]Hello world![/red]\n"
with rich_console.pager(styles=True):
    rich_console.print(text)

No matter what I have set as PAGER, I cannot get rich to properly display colors.

❯ PAGER=less python rich_pager_debug.py
31mHello world!0m

❯ PAGER='less -r' python rich_pager_debug.py
31mHello world!0m

❯ PAGER='less -R' python rich_pager_debug.py
31mHello world!0m

However, manually calling less results in colors as expected.

❯ python rich_pager_debug.py | less -R

Platform

• macOS 11.6
• iTerm2
• macOS Terminal
• less 590
• less 487

Diagnose

Diagnosis

python -m rich.diagnose

╭───────────────────────── <class 'rich.console.Console'> ─────────────────────────╮
│ A high level console interface.                                                  │
│                                                                                  │
│ ╭──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╮ │
│ │ <console width=250 ColorSystem.TRUECOLOR>                                    │ │
│ ╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯ │
│                                                                                  │
│     color_system = 'truecolor'                                                   │
│         encoding = 'utf-8'                                                       │
│             file = <_io.TextIOWrapper name='<stdout>' mode='w' encoding='utf-8'> │
│           height = 70                                                            │
│    is_alt_screen = False                                                         │
│ is_dumb_terminal = False                                                         │
│   is_interactive = True                                                          │
│       is_jupyter = False                                                         │
│      is_terminal = True                                                          │
│   legacy_windows = False                                                         │
│         no_color = False                                                         │
│          options = ConsoleOptions(                                               │
│                        size=ConsoleDimensions(width=250, height=70),             │
│                        legacy_windows=False,                                     │
│                        min_width=1,                                              │
│                        max_width=250,                                            │
│                        is_terminal=True,                                         │
│                        encoding='utf-8',                                         │
│                        max_height=70,                                            │
│                        justify=None,                                             │
│                        overflow=None,                                            │
│                        no_wrap=False,                                            │
│                        highlight=None,                                           │
│                        markup=None,                                              │
│                        height=None                                               │
│                    )                                                             │
│            quiet = False                                                         │
│           record = False                                                         │
│         safe_box = True                                                          │
│             size = ConsoleDimensions(width=250, height=70)                       │
│        soft_wrap = False                                                         │
│           stderr = False                                                         │
│            style = None                                                          │
│         tab_size = 8                                                             │
│            width = 250                                                           │
╰──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╯

python -m rich._windows

platform="Darwin"
WindowsConsoleFeatures(vt=False, truecolor=False)

python -m pip freeze | grep rich

rich @ file:///Users/pawlu/Library/Caches/pypoetry/artifacts/3a/dc/af/ff80071ba5431c81f40a3c922ff1585e7a3060b5549088275f57ee6975/rich-10.12.0-py3-none-any.whl

---

As always, appreicate the work on the library and continued development!

[willmcgugan]

@paw-lu Thanks for doing the investigation. Because we’re using pydoc, there’s not much we can do. We’ve documented the behaviour for now. In the future we might have a better solution.

[willmcgugan]

That actually works for me. I can see colour with both methods. Rich uses the stdlib pydoc module for the default paging, so it should use the same mechanism if you did help() from the REPL or pydoc sys from the command line.

I’m on a similar platform to you, so I’m not sure what could be different.

Can you print os.environ in your test code, just to check its not env var related.