Re: \b character escapes in CLI usage

From: Kyle Lippincott <spectral@google.com>
Date: Feb 26, 2025, 16:38 UTC
Message-ID: <CAO_smVjC=CWeAEjZjr9PPuBTkyYus59o_J9hfnpJCB-AsBE0HA@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <20250226080902.GA29996@coredump.intra.peff.net>

On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 12:09 AM Jeff King <peff@peff.net> wrote:

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>
> On Wed, Feb 26, 2025 at 02:38:23AM -0500, Jeff King wrote:
>
> > I wonder if we should consider adding "U" to the default $LESS variable
> > we set.
>
> Having tried this for 5 minutes, the answer is a resounding "no". It
> also treats tabs as control characters, making source code diffs rather
> ugly. ;)
>
> In modern versions of less you can get around it with:
>
>   LESS="-U --proc-tab"
>
> or:
>
>   LESS="--PROC-BACKSPACE"
>
> but those are new in less 632, from the last year or two. So I don't
> think we can rely on it in our default variable, but people with recent
> versions of less should consider setting it.

From another issue (https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues/557) I learned you can do this:

LESSKEY_CONTENT='#env;#version>=632 LESS=${LESS} --PROC-BACKSPACE'

I haven't tested it yet, but that might be a decent solution? I don't know how composable those are; e.g. if you wanted both --PROC-BACKSPACE on >=632 and --no-poll on >=670, I'm *assuming* you can do that, but I don't know what the syntax looks like.

Show 7 quoted lines

>
> Looks like it was added for exactly this case:
>
>   https://github.com/gwsw/less/issues/335
>
> -Peff
>