I recently became frightfully aware of how much time I spend in
less(1).
It’s never been a utility I gave much conscious thought and I realized that it
is one of those programs that go largely ignored and underappreciated just for
their ubiquity and unobtrusiveness. For most people piping something to
less(1) has most likely become second nature. In the same way it is surely
unthinkable for some to read log files and manuals in anything other than
less(1), or use any other pager for the Git suite.
If you’ve not given less(1) a closer look, I invite you to read its
manual. There’s lots of
neat features you might have missed, like filtering lines with &, toggling any
command-line option on the fly with -, following input as it appears with F,
or opening the current file in an editor with v.
A feature I discovered only recently is the “wrap-around search modifier”.
Introduced in
late 2020
(past version 565), this modifier obsoletes the common dance of g and n to
redo the current search on the whole file. Now, if you hit Ctrl-W right after
issuing a forward or backward search, less(1) toggles search wrap-around.
There is no option to turn this behaviour on automatically. However, it is
possible to override the / and ? bindings using
lesskey(1).
Put the following in ~/.lesskey, run lesskey
(not needed
on versions past 590), and less(1) should now wrap the search automatically:
#command
/ forw-search ^W
? back-search ^W