Assorted less(1) tips
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Assorted less(1) tips
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Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#2There -R to quit if the file is less than the screen size. There's also most as an alternative pager, and also glow (of course which, my fork of it is better) to render md files in the terminal.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#3The tip that I've been using quite a lot lately by debugging long log files is using `&` to filter what I want to read and `&!` to filter-out what's not useful (and they support regexes).
Admittedly, they are a bit slow sometime and sure, you could use `grep -v` then pipe which is way faster, but they've saved me on removing noise from logfiles from time to time when you don't always know what to filter beforehand :).
EDIT: It was in TFA.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#4Also -X or --no-init
" ... desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen."
I prefer to not clear the screen. I usually want to continue to refer to something or even copy/paste from the content to my current command line.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#5Surprised they missed follow! It’s a bit odd to use, but once you get used to it it’s better than tail in many circumstances IMO. `less +F` starts less following stdin or whatever file argument you’ve provided. breaks following, allowing you to search around a business-as-usual `less` session. Hitting `F` (that’s uppercase) starts following again. Yes, you can just start following within a session with `F` too if you forgot to add +F to the `less` invocation.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#6Some of these come intuitively when you know how to use vim. I expect to be able to search when pressing / in terminal programs, just like I expect Ctrl+F to work in GUIs.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#7Surprised they missed follow! It’s a bit odd to use, but once you get used to it it’s better than tail in many circumstances IMO. `less +F` starts less following stdin or whatever file argument you’ve provided. breaks following, allowing you to search around a business-as-usual `less` session. Hitting `F` (that’s uppercase) starts following again. Yes, you can just start following within a session with `F` too if you…
I'm so mad that I didn't know the hitting F thing!
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#8You can also press `s` to save data from a pipe to a file rather than manually copy pasting.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#9Also -X or --no-init " ... desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen." I prefer to not clear the screen. I usually want to continue to refer to something or even copy/paste from the content to my current command line.
And combined with -E, it'll quit immediately if the output is smaller than the terminal size.
...And combined with some of the other options in the post, my go-to has been "less -SEXIER" for a long time. Specifying E twice doesn't seem to do anything except make this easier to remember.
Re: Assorted less(1) tips
#10Less can be configured with a ~/.lesskey file
I have a single line in my config[1] which binds s to back-scroll, so that d and s are right next to each other and I can quickly page up/down with one hand.
If you’re on macOS, you may not be able to use this unless you install less from Homebrew, or otherwise replace the default less.[2]
[1] https://github.com/jez/dotfiles/blob/master/lesskey#L2
[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27269/is-less1-mis...