Your right the terminal has nothing to do with it, i use less as $PAGER too.

PAGER=more man man
>
Breaks the scrollback, if it try "more somelargefile" it works.

More is part of the util-linux package and therefore it is the only pager 
installed by default.

Am Mittwoch, 16. September 2015 22:58:56 UTC+2 schrieb Donald Allen:
>
>
>
> On Wednesday, September 16, 2015 at 2:38:47 PM UTC-4, Duncaen wrote:
>>
>> About 'v', do you have setup $EDITOR or $VISUAL in your shell environment.
>> On the problem with 'b' or '^b', the man page of more says it only works 
>> with files and not with pipes, is this the problem?
>>
>
> Sounds very plausible. I'm used to the man on Arch, which presents the man 
> pages in a vim-like environment (maybe it is vim?). The simple vi commands 
> work, and 'gg' gets you to the top, as in vim. The use of more, 
> particularly if you can't scroll back, is big step backwards (pun intended).
>  
>
>> For me it works as expected with st as terminal emulator.
>>
>
> That would not seem to be consistent with your pipe theory above. Why 
> should the terminal emulator matter if more won't scroll back when its 
> input is a pipe? Nonetheless, I tried installing st and its behavior is 
> bizarre. Every character displayed has a lot of whitespace after it, 
> including what you type. I could not get man to work and gave up. I am 
> running a newly installed Void on a PC with an AMD processor, ATI video 
> hardware and no desktop system, just a window manager (dwm). 
>
>>
>> Am Mittwoch, 16. September 2015 20:29:25 UTC+2 schrieb Donald Allen:
>>>
>>> When displaying manpages with man, more is used. Typing '?' at more 
>>> claims that 'b' or 'ctrl-b' will scroll backwards. It does not work. The 
>>> 'v' command doesn't work either.
>>>
>>