Re: [9fans] plan 9 : any pager?

[Ethan Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm>]

On Thu, Oct 4, 2018, at 9:29 AM, Rudolf Sykora wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Oct 2018 at 09:22, Ethan Gardener <eekee57@fastmail.fm> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 3, 2018, at 4:20 AM, Skip Tavakkolian wrote:
> > > Turn off the scroll in the rio window that the shell is running in, then cat the file.
> >
> > This is my preferred option too.  Also works in 9term.  I liked to play MUDs this way, but without color I missed stuff.
>
> This has the problem of inability to search within the text,
> e.g. when reading a man page.

'look' has been added to the button-2 menu in 9front.  It's limited, but better than nothing.

> On the other hand, a pager should perhaps be only a pager.
>
> When one needs to do searching, something like 'less' on unixes
> is far more convenient for me.

Less's features help somewhat, but I still prefer short manual pages. It's not like you can search for sequences of words in Less, thanks to the practice of replacing arbitrary spaces with newlines.  Or can you?  The last time I tried was probably more than a decade ago.  Anyway, there is still hyphenation, which Less still couldn't deal with a few months ago.  This separation of formatting from display is bad, as far as I'm concerned.


--
Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long -- Ogden Nash