This is going against exactly what Doug is arguing, though: Unix taste includes having many small, perfectly-designed programs to achieve great power. Adding more and more features to something simple adds complexity, and therefore, in Doug's opinion, makes it less elegant.

Obviously `less` is a pretty bad example for this, because it's so simple. But that's his point-- it should just be a pager, that's it. But it doesn't just do that-- it does a great many other things, has all sorts of arguments that you can pass to it unnecessarily.

Regarding your xterm comment, you might want to consider the `st` terminal emulator, a suckless tool. It's really great, consists of one C file, and is extremely minimal.