[TUHS] Less -- was Termcap vs terminfo

random832 at fastmail.us random832 at fastmail.us
Tue Jan 13 05:38:25 AEST 2015



On Sun, Jan 11, 2015, at 00:20, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> Sorry for veering away from Unix history, but this pushed one of the
> hottest
> of my buttons. Less is the epitome of modern Unix decadence. Besides the
> maddening behavior described above, why, when all screens have a scroll
> bar,
> should a pager do its own scrolling?

The console screen doesn't, and the one in an emulator can't be
controlled by the pager. The real question is why a pager should be
executed at all in an xterm. Except xterm has no ability to search in
scrollback, and its buffer may not be large enough for some very large
manpages.



More information about the TUHS mailing list