🐛 Can't disable line numbering from command line

[HaleTom]

If I run:

git diff | delta --line-numbers=false | cat

I see line numbers.

How do I disable line numbers from the command line?

I tried --no-line-numbers, but no joy. It would be great to be able to disable any boolean with --no-*, to override something that had been previously enabled (eg by a script or bash alias)

[dandavison]

Hi @HaleTom, thanks for this. I agree it would be nice if this were more convenient. I think the best that's available right now is:

1. git config --global delta.line-numbers false; git diff
   Not perfect but I've been finding this approach quite useful. Of course one can go further in this direction with custom shell aliases / wrapper functions.

2. delta --no-gitconfig
   But then you have to build back up the options you do require

A couple of tangential thoughts:

Sometimes I wonder if it might have been better not to use boolean flags at all in delta and only use flags with explicit values, especially seeing as delta is mostly not used directly at the command line. However, I don't think there's a path there that retains backwards compatibility.

Is adding --no-* negating versions automatically something that one could hope that Rust's clap (and hence structOpt) package could do automatically? I don't think it does.

[dandavison]

Ref clap-rs/clap#815 ("Add support for automatic negation flags")

[dandavison]

The current plan for addressing this is #340 (comment) (and see #446).

[dandavison]

@HaleTom is the following a workaround for you?

[delta]
    features = line-numbers

[delta "no-line-numbers"]
    line-numbers = false

Now by default delta will have line-numbers and they can be disabled with delta --features=no-line-numbers, or DELTA_FEATURES=no-line-numbers git show etc. There's similar discussion at #492 (comment) and dandavison/magit-delta#13 (comment).

[dandavison]

In the master branch we can now do git -c delta.line-numbers=false (see #493).

So I think that's the most convenient way to do it for the case of using delta with git. It should also be possible to disable it on the delta command line somehow, but perhaps that's less of a priority since we can do it conveniently in the git case, and we have the features workaround #307 (comment) otherwise.

[Atemu]

@dandavison I'm using your magit plugin and want it to display line numbers when called from command line git but not when called from magit.
In order to achieve that, line-numbers needs to be in the git config and magit needs a --no-line-numbers flag to override it.

[dandavison]

Hi @Atemu, two thoughts:

1. If you only need a few options set in magit-delta, then you could make it be completely independent of your git config using --no-gitconfig. This is what I do:

  (add-to-list 'magit-delta-delta-args "--no-gitconfig")
  (add-to-list 'magit-delta-delta-args "--light")

2. Otherwise, I think it should be possible to do what you want with a delta "feature" for use by magit-delta. This might take a bit of playing around, but I just had a go and the following seems to work:

[delta]
   features = not-magit-delta

[delta "not-magit-delta"]
   line-numbers = true

[delta "magit-delta"]
    line-numbers = false

  (setq magit-delta-delta-args (append magit-delta-delta-args '("--features" "magit-delta")))

[dandavison]

This doesn't help with disabling something set in git config, but in case anyone comes across this issue searching for how to conveniently enable something like line-numbers or side-by-side, then IMO the best way is the DELTA_FEATURES environment variable, with its special and very useful + prefix (thanks to @bew: #848 (comment)):

on:

export DELTA_FEATURES=+line-numbers

off:

export DELTA_FEATURES=+

[God-damnit-all]

Using GIT_CONFIG_PARAMETERS isn't a bad solution, but you can't use in combination with --no-gitconfig

Honestly, I don't see why --no-line-numbers can't just be a CLI option.