Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: Jonathan Nieder <jrnieder@gmail.com>
Date: Apr 24, 2014, 00:11 UTC
Message-ID: <20140424001126.GG15516@google.com>
In-Reply-To: <4dc69237123e8962b2b2b901692ea78e.id@mailtor>

(cc-ing Mark Nudelman, less maintainer) Hi,

d9ba@mailtor.net wrote:

Show 9 quoted lines

> Consider this diff, printed by `git diff`
>
> 	 #!/usr/bin/env python
> 	-print('foo')
> 	+print('bar')
>
> Looks ok to merge and run.
>
> But, after disabling the pager:

Unfortunately there are other kinds of subtle bugs that can be hard to see in a terminal, too.

[...]

> It would be nice if we could change the flags to either
>
>  a) avoid cutting off
>  b) indicate something has been cut off (<- I prefer this)

That sounds like a nice feature request for 'less': a marker on the right margin when --chop-long-lines is in use and a line has been chopped. I don't see it at http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/bugs.html#enhance so maybe no one else has thought of it yet.

Mark, what do you think?

Thanks, Jonathan