UNIX Administratosphere

I, like most people I know, adore the file pager less. However, for whatever inconceivable reason, new UNIX systems (Linux doesn’t count here!) virtually never come with less. So… what to do when less is missing?

HP-UX, for one, comes with more and pg. Everything comes with more - but once you’ve used less you’ll never want to use a standard more again. The pager pg really isn’t any better.

Is there a solution? Yes - view.

What is view? The program view is a file pager which is included on virtually all UNIX and Linux systems. The view program is available, for example, in Solaris 9, HP-UX 11i v2, FreeBSD 6.2, Red Hat Linux 9, and more.

If you know vi, then you’ll know view. Why? Because view is actually vi in disguise, acting as a file pager with read-only access to the file.

The biggest drawback to view is that it does not handle stdin; that is, using view as the destination of a pipe gets very messy very fast (i.e., don’t do that!).

Apparently, vim handles this situation much better. Perhaps much better: there are ways to specify the use of vim with less keymappings, and to use view (i.e., vim) for general pager use! There are directions on how to make vim work as a man page viewer complete with syntax highlighting. Here is the quick and dirty instructions (for ksh):

export MANPAGER="col -b | view -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -"

For less key bindings, use (for ksh again):

export MANPAGER="col -b | /usr/share/vim/vim61/macros/less.sh -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist' -"

Be sure to use the right macro location for your version of vim. If you check out the original directions, be sure to read all of the comments: there are directions on how to properly configure the environment so reading man pages inside vim will work properly, and so that non-English locales can be handled properly, and more.

Next time you find yourself suffering without less - stop suffering through more and use view instead. You’ll be glad you did.