Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014)

Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by oneeyedpigeon on Friday June 10, 2016 @06:05AM (#11875331)

Look in the man page. There's an entire section about how to edit the command line that is used when entering, for example, the command to view a different named file. That smells really bad - surely that mechanism shouldn't be specific enough to a pager that it needs a huge section in the help file.

All-in-all, less does feel big relative to other programs adhering to the unix philosophy. I tried to do a feature-comparison between more and less just now but, unfortunately, on OSX:

    ~/src/c$ more --version
    less 418

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Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by GFK_of_xmaspast on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:34AM (#11875890)

So now you're complaining that "there's too much documentation"? (or that "once you're in less you shouldn't be able to view another file without quitting"?)

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Re:Doug McIlroy on Unix Taste (2014) by notalaser on Friday June 10, 2016 @08:55AM (#11875993)

He's complaining that there's too much crap in a single program that shouldn't have to do anything other than page files.

It has been possible to view another file without quitting less since pretty much the dawn of Unix time by suspending less and launching another instance (or, more recently, as in for the last thirty years or so, by using a terminal multiplexer).

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