I have been using less wrong. For a long time I have had LESS=-R in my
.bashrc to make less display colors.
Ever since I set this, I’ve had trouble with git paging its output even when
it would fit on a single page. This has bothered me, but I did not connect it
to the LESS setting.
It turns out that git is quite sophisticated. When its output is paged via
less, it looks if LESS env var is set, and sets it to -FRX if it is not.
The -F part is the important one. If tells less to not do anything if the
output fits on screen.