On 08/11/2025 11:32, Страхиња Радић wrote:
Дана 25/11/07 11:32PM, Jon Tibble написа:
I've been having issues with less -F not working in xterm. The command
just returns without displaying anything. This can be worked around by
adding -X to not initialise the terminal. This works fine, without -X,
in the console.
OpenBSD equivalent of
less -FR
is
less -FRcX
You can set those in LESS environment variable, or (for git)
core.pager=/usr/bin/less -FRcX
in .gitconfig. Works For Me™.
Thanks for the response. Unfortunately they are not quite equivalent
due to -F behaviour with the upstream patches on other OSs. This may
be considered a side-effect rather than the goal of -F itself with the
primary goal of exiting being consistent across OSs so, to be clear, I
do not consider this a bug.
So, with the side-effect, there are three less behaviours here:
1 - All is paged and on the alt screen where available so does not
appear in the terminal scrollback upon exit. This seems to be the
general default across OSs with no flags.
2 - All is not paged and is dumped into the scrollback. This is the
general behaviour in OS consoles and when using -X in terminals
where the alt screen is available.
3 - A hybrid mode, for terminals that have alt screens, where content
that fits in a single screen is not paged and appears in the
scrollback and longer content is paged and will not appear in the
scrollback. This is the behaviour with -F on other OSs.
So the behaviour that is being addressed in the patch is 3 which is
currently missing in the OpenBSD less.
Going the other way, the equivalent of your OpenBSD command on other
OSs would be
less -FRX
because the -X makes everything dump to scrollback yielding behaviour
2 instead of 3.
Best Regards,
Jon
