many programs use less without telling you

less lets you through text, so programs will use less by default any time they want to display a lot of text

git, represented by a box with a smiley face: I want to display a huge diff… I’ll show it in less!

man, also represented by a box with a smiley face: I need to display a man page… I’ll use less!

it’s less because it’s an improved version of more

how to know you’re in less

if it’s suddenly full screen and there’s this little colon in the bottom left, it might be less

a few less tips

• quit: q
• help: h
• scroll: arrow keys/spacebar/mouse wheel
• search: /banana ENTER
• next/prev match: n/N
• go to start/end: g/G

also piping to less -R will interpret escape codes like colours

how to tell a program not to use less

you can set the PAGER environment variable to something else to programs to use that instead

I’ve never had any reason to set PAGER though

programs will also drop you into vim sometimes

the default text editor is vim. If you don’t like vim you can set the EDITOR environment variable

export EDITOR=micro
(your favourite editor here)