I made a terminal pager

I am definitely waiting for a "modern less replacement" in the same vein as fd, sd, fzf, and the rest of the under-20yo cli crew. I get that "less" is reasonably maintained still.

I think the killer feature for me would be refresh. I get that this can't work for piped input, but I want `git diff` to show in a pager with a refresh button that holds my place. fzf supports both refresh and piped input, so perhaps there's some ideas there that could be leveraged.

Well-written article!

I wish there was some kind of standard to tell CLI apps what features to expect from the system pager, so they can act accordingly …

Right now, apps can talk to the terminal to check for feature support, but all of that falls apart when the output is piped to a pager. (Do we support inline links? ANSI colors? Sixel support??)

Shameless plug, specifically regarding Sixel support: I needed a pager with better image support than just less -r and made https://github.com/roblillack/lessi

I wrote streampager a few years ago to scratch a similar itch. It works well enough for my own uses (and is/was used in library form as the built-in pager for sapling and jj).

I think it still needs some work for more general use which I unfortunately don't have time for at the moment.

If I remember correctly, `gum` also provides a pager feature: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

I suggest writing an intro which would answer 'why' you made it.

Interesting project.

What was the main limitation in existing pagers like less that pushed you to build a new one?

How does this compare to less with syntax highlighting? I've been using bat as a pager (bat --paging=always) and it covers most of what I need. Curious what the advantage is for larger files.

The TL;DR doesn’t really say what this new pager offers compared to less; it seems to mostly be a learning project:

> lore supports only a subset of what less does, but in a more intuitive and useful manner for my daily activity. I also find value in understanding it from the ground up, bytes to terminal views, and continuing to refine it as I learn more about what I actually want and need in a terminal pager.

I really like this post! I think it's the clearest explanation I've seen of the different characteristics of utf-8 strings

bat is the king of pagers. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

Was curious but the git link there doesn't load?

From the title I thought it’s about a dead man’s switch.

It's not great but I made a typescript library to wrap pickers recently, such as skim, fuzzel, fzf, dmenu, rofi, etc. Some very similar problems.

Would love if anyone has thoughts or suggestions. It was quick and dirty, and works fine for my use, but I'm not sure where else I could take this, how else I might splice apart the problem, what else would suit it. https://tangled.org/jauntywk.bsky.social/picker-power

good work

A Splunk, a Splunk! My kingdom for a Splunk!

(too bad Cisco bought them and made it too expensive).

Also, no "less does more than more and most does more than less" joke?

Also called `vi -`

For a bubbletea application I'd expect more bubbles and tea there. But still, nice project.