[TUHS] Fwd: Origins and life of the pg pager

[Michael Siegel]

Am 15.06.20 um 16:56 schrieb Clem Cole:

> Funny, when Steve Zimmerman was at Masscomp, one of the things he did
> was put the ITS style 'more' into the TTY driver (along with Tenex
> style ^T), both of which  I loved having until I went to Stellar --
> it was always on my list of things that would be cool.   But we had
> window managers by then, and we never thought adding more into the
> TTY driver it was worth it.   The truth is, either put it in the
> driver as a base feature so everything that runs gets support for it
> without having to remember to add it to the pipeline, or solves the
> problem more globally like a window manager does. I can see good
> arguments to both schemes -- that later is a tad more elegant and see
> seems simpler / less complex (Doug's rules).  In fact, we have lived
> with that style of solution for years, but ... I still need to use
> more(1) even with a window manager/terminal emulator that allows me
> to scroll 'forever' [I don't need many of the features of less(1)],
> but something like p/pg/more does seem to be desirable.

>From my perspective as a user, I would love to see paging built in.
Having to use pagers to view terminal output conveniently is, in my
opinion, a major nuisance.

In fact, my question about the origin and life of pg(1) arose while
writing a yet unfinished addendum to a blog article that details my
failed attempt to hack together a solution for auto-paged ls(1).[1]

The conclusion there was: Those attempts (you can find them in quite a
few places throughout the Web) are futile, just pipe to a pager when you
need it.

However, there's no need to write out "less" every time. You can just
alias that to "pg" without causing any harm and save two letters, which
is an improvement for a task that is performed manually rather often.


Michael

[1] https://www.msiism.org/blog/2019/07/17/no_fun_with_auto-paged_ls.html


PS: I hope it's okay that I chose to reply just to the list address and
take all the other addresses out. If not, please let me know.