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CGamesPlay 19 hours ago [-]
I am definitely waiting for a "modern less replacement" in the same vein as fd, sd, fzf, and the rest of the under-20yo cli crew. I get that "less" is reasonably maintained still.
I think the killer feature for me would be refresh. I get that this can't work for piped input, but I want `git diff` to show in a pager with a refresh button that holds my place. fzf supports both refresh and piped input, so perhaps there's some ideas there that could be leveraged.
zeech 19 hours ago [-]
I went looking for a 'new' pager a couple years back and settled on this [0]. I've since gone back to `less` since it got annoying jumping between systems and having different pagers, but when I used it it was quite nice.
I've noticed that subconsciously, I've started to use `bat` for interactive paging, even though that's not its main use case
CGamesPlay 10 hours ago [-]
Bat just uses less internally. And it deliberately breaks less’ handling of ^C, annoyingly.
indentit 2 hours ago [-]
Bat has an option to use a built-in pager, a Rust crate called minus
codethief 6 hours ago [-]
+1 I actually came here hoping that OP had built a better `less`. Along with refresh, I'd also love to see mouse compatibility (scrolling etc.) and better performance when reading huge files.
can you give an example of what you mean and how you might expect it to be achieved with a reloaded diff? otherwise `while true; git diff --color=always |less -r; done` gets you most of the way to what you are asking for
CGamesPlay 7 hours ago [-]
Realistically, I will be reviewing a diff, see a hunk I don’t like, change it, and want to see the change back in less. So saving my scroll offset would accomplish my goal. I guess I should add that I want to be able to quit as well?
Like I said, fzf does this. Bind a key to an action that effectively changes the file from stdin to a different command that it runs, while preserving view state.
anthk 15 hours ago [-]
That should be under a less(1) flag, but optional as it can mess piping.
asibahi 9 hours ago [-]
Slightly related: I am an Arab who speaks Arabic and reads Arabic and the only place I ever see the unicode character ﷽ is by programmers giving an example of "unicode is too hard".
Perhaps as a graphical element at the beginning of books, too.
It is a part of the Arabic Presentation Forms block which explicitly is for supporting legacy encodings and should not be used.
dyauspitr 7 hours ago [-]
The whole phrase is one character?
pekim 6 hours ago [-]
It's one codepoint, U+FDFD, with the name "Arabic Ligature Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Raheem".
It’s one code point that’s (in theory) meant to hold the ligature of the whole phrase. As it stands it’s only used as a demonstration of Unicode difficulty.
goodmythical 5 hours ago [-]
﷽ translates to "In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful."
But it is indeed just the single character (U+FDFD)
da_rob 14 hours ago [-]
Well-written article!
I wish there was some kind of standard to tell CLI apps what features to expect from the system pager, so they can act accordingly …
Right now, apps can talk to the terminal to check for feature support, but all of that falls apart when the output is piped to a pager. (Do we support inline links? ANSI colors? Sixel support??)
Shameless plug, specifically regarding Sixel support: I needed a pager with better image support than just less -r and made https://github.com/roblillack/lessi
xk3 21 minutes ago [-]
maybe just check TERM? although to be honest--do you even need a pager if your shell/terminal is nice enough?
I rarely pipe to a pager because kitty/fish/tmux support OSC 133 pretty well and I can press one button to go up to the previous command prompt and another button to go back. I can press a few keys to search the scrollback. It all works seamlessly across SSH sessions too if you set it up right.
I wrote streampager a few years ago to scratch a similar itch. It works well enough for my own uses (and is/was used in library form as the built-in pager for sapling and jj).
I think it still needs some work for more general use which I unfortunately don't have time for at the moment.
vomayank 22 hours ago [-]
Interesting project.
What was the main limitation in existing pagers like less that pushed you to build a new one?
lrobinovitch 21 hours ago [-]
Author here!
If I were to give this post a longer title, it would be "I made a terminal pager because I needed a really good viewport component for my Go TUIs, then realized that a TUI viewport is just a mini terminal pager and I want the same text navigation and manipulation experience everywhere that I encounter long text blocks in my terminal".
I take no issue at all with `less`, it's super powerful and configurable as I call out in the post. I took the functionality I needed, made it a reusable component for Go TUIs, then made a terminal pager in the form of a Go TUI with it.
ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago [-]
"Because I felt like it" is also a perfectly acceptable answer ;-)
ghthor 20 hours ago [-]
Still use Wander everyday <3
thegdsks 18 hours ago [-]
How does this compare to less with syntax highlighting? I've been using bat as a pager (bat --paging=always) and it covers most of what I need. Curious what the advantage is for larger files.
14 hours ago [-]
pimlottc 23 hours ago [-]
The TL;DR doesn’t really say what this new pager offers compared to less; it seems to mostly be a learning project:
> lore supports only a subset of what less does, but in a more intuitive and useful manner for my daily activity. I also find value in understanding it from the ground up, bytes to terminal views, and continuing to refine it as I learn more about what I actually want and need in a terminal pager.
broken-kebab 14 hours ago [-]
I suggest writing an intro which would answer 'why' you made it.
ErroneousBosh 10 hours ago [-]
Why wouldn't you?
gandreani 22 hours ago [-]
I really like this post! I think it's the clearest explanation I've seen of the different characteristics of utf-8 strings
In fact it's not. The name itself mimicks cat, not less. It's a filter that adds annotations to its input, such as syntax highlighting, git diffs and special-char coloring.
Personally I can't find any use for bat: I'm a devote user of vim for editing, and it already does all of this, so why not using it to view files as well? It's satisfying to have the same interface, colors and shortcuts whether you're editing or viewing!
technojamin 7 hours ago [-]
I use it for previewing files in `fzf` and `lf` (terminal file manager).
saghm 19 hours ago [-]
I like it a lot more than `less`, but unfortunately it's always a lot slower when first opening really large files. I'm not sure if it's eagerly loading the whole thing (maybe because that's needed for AST parsing in the case of syntax highlighting, although it happens even on files without highlighting), but there are times I have to swap to `less` still.
jzer0cool 16 hours ago [-]
Was curious but the git link there doesn't load?
dostick 21 hours ago [-]
From the title I thought it’s about a dead man’s switch.
nkoren 16 hours ago [-]
I thought it was about replicating a mossad supply chain attack.
jauntywundrkind 19 hours ago [-]
It's not great but I made a typescript library to wrap pickers recently, such as skim, fuzzel, fzf, dmenu, rofi, etc. Some very similar problems.
Would love if anyone has thoughts or suggestions. It was quick and dirty, and works fine for my use, but I'm not sure where else I could take this, how else I might splice apart the problem, what else would suit it. https://tangled.org/jauntywk.bsky.social/picker-power
fragmede 21 hours ago [-]
A Splunk, a Splunk! My kingdom for a Splunk!
(too bad Cisco bought them and made it too expensive).
Also, no "less does more than more and most does more than less" joke?
umutnaber 16 hours ago [-]
good work
sourcegrift 19 hours ago [-]
Also called `vi -`
cocodill 22 hours ago [-]
For a bubbletea application I'd expect more bubbles and tea there. But still, nice project.
I think the killer feature for me would be refresh. I get that this can't work for piped input, but I want `git diff` to show in a pager with a refresh button that holds my place. fzf supports both refresh and piped input, so perhaps there's some ideas there that could be leveraged.
[0] https://github.com/walles/moor
can you give an example of what you mean and how you might expect it to be achieved with a reloaded diff? otherwise `while true; git diff --color=always |less -r; done` gets you most of the way to what you are asking for
Like I said, fzf does this. Bind a key to an action that effectively changes the file from stdin to a different command that it runs, while preserving view state.
Perhaps as a graphical element at the beginning of books, too.
It is a part of the Arabic Presentation Forms block which explicitly is for supporting legacy encodings and should not be used.
https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+FDFD
But it is indeed just the single character (U+FDFD)
I wish there was some kind of standard to tell CLI apps what features to expect from the system pager, so they can act accordingly …
Right now, apps can talk to the terminal to check for feature support, but all of that falls apart when the output is piped to a pager. (Do we support inline links? ANSI colors? Sixel support??)
Shameless plug, specifically regarding Sixel support: I needed a pager with better image support than just less -r and made https://github.com/roblillack/lessi
I rarely pipe to a pager because kitty/fish/tmux support OSC 133 pretty well and I can press one button to go up to the previous command prompt and another button to go back. I can press a few keys to search the scrollback. It all works seamlessly across SSH sessions too if you set it up right.
https://github.com/charmbracelet
I think it still needs some work for more general use which I unfortunately don't have time for at the moment.
What was the main limitation in existing pagers like less that pushed you to build a new one?
If I were to give this post a longer title, it would be "I made a terminal pager because I needed a really good viewport component for my Go TUIs, then realized that a TUI viewport is just a mini terminal pager and I want the same text navigation and manipulation experience everywhere that I encounter long text blocks in my terminal".
I take no issue at all with `less`, it's super powerful and configurable as I call out in the post. I took the functionality I needed, made it a reusable component for Go TUIs, then made a terminal pager in the form of a Go TUI with it.
> lore supports only a subset of what less does, but in a more intuitive and useful manner for my daily activity. I also find value in understanding it from the ground up, bytes to terminal views, and continuing to refine it as I learn more about what I actually want and need in a terminal pager.
Personally I can't find any use for bat: I'm a devote user of vim for editing, and it already does all of this, so why not using it to view files as well? It's satisfying to have the same interface, colors and shortcuts whether you're editing or viewing!
Would love if anyone has thoughts or suggestions. It was quick and dirty, and works fine for my use, but I'm not sure where else I could take this, how else I might splice apart the problem, what else would suit it. https://tangled.org/jauntywk.bsky.social/picker-power
(too bad Cisco bought them and made it too expensive).
Also, no "less does more than more and most does more than less" joke?