I probably haven't read a man page "cover to cover" since high school. Usually I just need to read a couple lines about a specific flag or the location of some configuration file which I can find quickly with a simple search or by scanning the document with my eyes.

Your terminal doesn't scroll with wheel/trackpad?

The wheel or trackpad scrolls the terminal's scrollback, not the pager program that happens to be running in it.

(I can imagine some sort of hackery that determines if less or something is running and scrolls that, but it sounds like a huge mess. Is that actually what you're doing? Does it send keypresses? What if you're in a mode where those keypresses do something besides scrolling?)

No I'm talking about scrolling in the actual program running - it's most useful in a pager obviously, but it also works for editors, and it works both locally (OS X, built-in Terminal.app) and over SSH on Debian hosts.

I'll be honest - I have ~no idea~ (edit: apparently there are xterm control sequences for mouse scrolling) how it's actually implemented, but several tools have some reference to mouse support (tmux, vim, etc) in option/config files, so it's probably available for your distro/platform and just needs to be enabled.

Further edit: (or PS. or whatever):

`less` pager supports mouse scrolling. `more` pager does not!

I just tried this on debian and my mouse wheel scrolls less inside of my terminal (and returns my previous line buffer when I type 'q').

It can do continuous scrolling of the terminal or line-by-line scrolling of the pager. Both are poor options for trying to actually read prose content inside the terminal, IMO, and opening a browser is easier.

What do you mean by "continuous" versus "line-by-line" scrolling? When I use the mousewheel to scroll a man page in xterm it behaves and appears the same as when I use the mousewheel to scroll a webpage in Chrome (the content moves smoothly up and down, disappearing at the top and bottom edges of the viewport).