Submitted by “Every now and again I like to spend a while becoming really familiar with the various tools which I use frequently. This week I spent several hours experimenting with the various paging applications available to Debian users. Here is my guide to the common pagers, and what they can do.”
I’m personally a fan of less. I always hated that with more you can’t scroll backwards. Less is very handy for viewing documentation since a lot of times you need to skip around.
Well …. less is more.
color manpages? use most.
cool! I didn’t know about lessfile. This is a great way to get around the debian way of putting readme’s in gzs!
port/package LOOKAT, made my default
manpage viewer (bsd),
s= search
g- goto line
q= quit
(imho way more comfortable)
Personnally, I like vim. It’s quick, efficient (althought we can argue on this), and has colors too.
I’m eager to download vim 7 and try it.
I would tend to agree… Vim takes a tiny bit longer to load a long file than less, but it’s so much more powerful, even if the input file is read-only. Line seeking isn’t very accurate in less, for some reason, and browsing source code is so much faster in vim.
Basically, I use these rules:
If there’s even a chance that I might want to edit a file, I’ll view it in vim.
If the file is source code, I always use vim.
If it’s a long log file, I tend to use less.
I think that less should be more vim-like. It should be like vim, stuck in permanent command mode. All vim commands should work in less, and it should read your .vimrc file (mostly for syntax highlighting and keybindings).
Oh, and vim has optional cscope support. For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, it basically turns vim into a hypertext code editor, where keywords are linked back to their definitions. I can’t express in words how useful this is.
Cscope is a very useful tool — it’s roughly similar to the IACULL source code indexing/search tool that I’m used to in the Unisys mainframe world.
I found it ironic that a mainframer like myself had to fight to get cscope installed on the development server when I first started to do Solaris development at a former place of employment. I thought UNIX people were supposed to be trendy types, and yet I encountered more NIH syndrome and fewer open minds in the distributed group than I did on the mainframe side of life. Most of the UNIX folks said to just use grep and forget about it, but it isn’t the same thing at all…
Ive also found w3m and links2 to be good pagers for local files.