Git branch command behaves like 'less'

Question

When I use the git branch command to list all branches, I see the output of git branch | less.

The command git branch is supposed to show a list of branches, like ls does for files.

This is the output I get:

How do I get the default behaviour of git branch? What causes the paged output?

I am using ZSH with oh_my_zsh (nothing for Git in there), and my .gitconfig looks like this:

[user]   email = [email protected]   name = Dennis Haegler [push]   default = simple [merge]    tool = vimdiff [core]   editor = nvim   excludesfile = /Users/dennish/.gitignore_global [color]   ui = true [alias]   br = branch   ci = commit -v   cam = commit -am   co = checkout   df = diff   st = status   sa = stash   mt = mergetool   cp = cherry-pick   pl = pull --rebase [difftool "sourcetree"]   cmd = opendiff \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\" [mergetool "sourcetree"]   cmd = /Applications/SourceTree.app/Contents/Resources/opendiff-w.sh    \"$LOCAL\" \"$REMOTE\" -ancestor \"$BASE\" -merge \"$MERGED\"   trustExitCode = true 

Answer 1

As mentioned in comments to Mark Adelsberger's answer, this was a default behavior change introduced in Git 2.16.

You can turn paged output for git branch back off by default with the pager.branch config setting:

git config --global pager.branch false 

Answer 2

As other answers pointed out, Git defaults to piping itself into a pager (less by default) for most commands.

An important point, though, is that when the LESS environment variable is unset, Git sets it to FRX, and the consequence is that the user-visible behavior is the same as if the pager was not used when the command's output is short (i.e. if you have only few branches). See man less:

-F or --quit-if-one-screen
Causes less to automatically exit if the entire file can be displayed on the first screen.

-R or --RAW-CONTROL-CHARS
[...]ANSI "color" escape sequences are output in "raw" form.

-X or --no-init
Disables sending the termcap initialization and deinitialization strings to the terminal. This is sometimes desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen.

If you get the behavior you describe, you most likely have $LESS set to something else, and unsetting it (unset LESS) would get rid of the issue while keeping the "pager" behavior for long output. Alternatively, you can activate the behavior for while keeping $LESS as-is by adding this to your .gitconfig file:

[core]     pager = less -FRX 

If you really dislike the pager thing, you can deactivate it globally or on a per-command basis (see other answers).