less

A modern, feature-rich terminal pager written in Rust, designed to be a more user-friendly alternative to traditional pagers like less or more.

Features

• 📜 Smooth scrolling with dynamic paging
• 🔍 Built-in search functionality
• 📁 File content viewing
• 📝 Support for piped input (stdin)
• 🎨 Clean and intuitive interface
• 🚀 Fast and memory-efficient

Installation

Prerequisites

• Rust toolchain (1.75.0 or later)
• A terminal that supports ANSI escape codes

Building from Source

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/rakki194/less.git
   cd less
   

2. Build the project:

   cargo build --release
   

The compiled binary will be available at target/release/less.

Usage

less can be used in two ways:

1. View a file:

   less <filename>
   

2. Read from piped input:

   command | less
   

Key Bindings

• Arrow Keys: Navigate up and down through the content
• Page Up/Down: Scroll by page
• / (forward slash): Enter search mode
• q: Quit the pager

Dependencies

• minus - Provides the core paging functionality with features like dynamic output and search
• anyhow - Error handling with backtraces

Technical Details

less is built with modern Rust practices and provides:

• Error handling with context using anyhow
• Thread-safe dynamic paging
• Efficient buffered reading of input
• Automatic detection of input source (file vs. stdin)

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is open source and available under the MIT License.

Acknowledgments

• Thanks to the creators of the minus crate for providing the core paging functionality
• Inspired by traditional Unix pagers while aiming to provide a more modern experience