Reference

Environment variables

Configuration, pager, editor and terminal color environment settings.

Variables

Custom path to a configuration directory; also used by mdv --init-config when no directory is provided.

Editor command used by the document browser and built-in pager; takes priority over EDITOR.

Known GUI editors launch asynchronously while terminal editors block until exit; Emacs and Vim modes are selected from their CLI arguments.
Unknown commands are treated as terminal editors.
Malformed commands and non-Unicode editor settings are reported as errors.

Optional editor launch mode: tui waits for the editor to exit, while gui launches it asynchronously.

When unset, the mode is detected automatically.
Explicit tui may be used with GUI launchers to pause the pager; explicit gui overrides unknown commands but is rejected for known terminal editors to prevent both processes from controlling the same terminal.
Invalid values and conflicts are reported in the pager without launching the editor.

Pager command, optionally with quoted paths and arguments (for example, less -R).

It selects the backend for --pager, mdv help, and documents opened from the interactive browser, but does not enable paging for ordinary output by itself.
An explicit --pager=<COMMAND> has higher priority; default selects the default backend (currently built-in minus), while builtin explicitly selects minus.
Empty, malformed, non-Unicode, and recursive mdv commands are errors.
Commands are split into a program and arguments and run directly without shell interpretation.

Sets auto, always, or never; an explicit --color has higher priority.