Joseph Kowalski <jek3 at sun.com> wrote:
> > "more" and "p" are pagers that behave forgivingly if the size of the
> > terminal is wrong or is a TERMCAP/TERMINFO is not optimal. "less" makes
> > the man output very hard to read in such a case. I propose to rather
> > fix minor problems in "more" than to switch to "less" as a default for
> > $PAGER.
> >
> > J?rg
> >
> Could you clarify the "minor problems"? I thought one was lack of cursor
> navigation, which I'm not sure I agree is "minor".
>
> That said, in principal, I tend to strongly agree.
You should in theory be able to check this yourself if you use
stty rows xxxx cols yyy
to set up something smaller than the real terminal.
The problem wigh less is that it does cursor adressing the wrong way.
It behaves as if it was an editor but it does things in a way that are
even bad for an editor.
"p" and "more" print the content and let the terminal scroll.
They then write a MORE prompt line and override this line to continie.
"less" starts to set up the terminal in the second screen display that
editors use, this makes the printed characters disappear after the terminal
is swithced back to "normal" mode.
"less" then writes the content in a way that is OK.
"less" then moves the cursor home, which is silly
"less" then moves the cursor down by the number of lines it believes
are on the screen, this must not be correct and creates a strange
screen.
After you replied to the MORE prompt, "less" clears the screen and writes
to the lower half of the screen and then writes the MORE prompt into
the middle of this text.
If you like to read important text that is split over more than one screen
"page", it is simple to read the complete text by using <shift> <page up>
if you used "p" or "more".
If you used "less", this does not work even in case that the TERMCAP/TERMINFO
settings are correct. If the size is not OK, the output looks even more
corrupted.
"less" is a pain to use compared to "more", for this reason it should not become
the default.
J?rg
--
EMail:joerg at schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) J?rg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js at cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
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