Re: Harmful LESS flags

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Apr 24, 2014, 22:44 UTC
Message-ID: <87ha5i9wkp.fsf@fencepost.gnu.org>
In-Reply-To: <20140424221308.GA15061@sigill.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 10 quoted lines

> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 11:48:30PM +0200, David Kastrup wrote:
>
>> > I really think the right solution here is to teach less to make it more
>> > obvious that there is something worth scrolling over to. Here's a very
>> > rough patch for less, if you want to see what I'm thinking of.
>> 
>> Still useless.  I'm not actually interested in a more prominent "I could
>> be useful" indicator.
>
> So don't set -S, then.

I don't.  Git does it unasked for.

Show 12 quoted lines

> There are two questions here:
>
>   1. Can less do a better job of indicating what's in the input when -S
>      is in effect?
>
>   2. What should get put into $LESS by default?
>
> I was specifically addressing (1). Your comment does not help at all
> there.
>
> It could have an impact on (2), but you didn't say anything besides "I
> don't like it". That doesn't add anything to the conversation.

No, I said it is useless, which is different from "I don't like it". The information is not copy&pastable from a terminal window since it is cut off. It is also useless for review since one does not actually know what's in there. The only thing it has going for it is that it's prettier than the actually usable information. Which might sometimes be nice if one is not interested overly in the payload, like when using --graph. But then even a graph display wants to get copy&pasted into windows with a different size from the terminal window, like in <URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=3723#c7>.

-- 
David Kastrup