Oct 24, 2026, 8:52 PMPerhaps I'm being silly, but [less] with scroll bars would be a nice thing to have. Not even clickable, necessarily, but just a visual indication of the size and position of the viewport vs the size of the document.
P.S., I am occasionally a very silly person. https://polymaths.social/@rl_dane/statuses/01M5QWY6H3STZMZ2A7678FP4FQ
@rl_dane xman?
@rl_dane scrollbars are so much a GUI thing, they irritate me in the terminal.
For less(1) specifically, I tend to temporarily enable line numbers if I need to know whereabouts in the file I am, and know the total either by a quic >+< before browsing, or ^Zwc file^Mfg^M
Oct 24, 2026, 9:24 PMWhat does >+< do?
Ctrl-G will give your place in the file (in terms of percentage), but not if you're viewing a stream.
I agree that GUI elements in TUI programs can be annoying and out-of-place, but scrollbars convey a lot of information while only taking up two columns (one for a needed space, one for the bar itself).
Indeed, the "scrollbar" could even be an element on the bottom status line, something like:
asciitable.txt lines 1-25/132 byte 659/1674 39% (press RETURN) ←██████────────→
What does >+< do?
Mate, you need a client that can distinguish <tt> from the rest 😺
> scrolls to EOF, < scrolls to BOF, and + means to press the keys in sequence 😹
Oct 25, 2026, 4:38 AMOH!!! #TIL!!! That's easier than Ggg
Oct 25, 2026, 4:38 AMWell, I'm on the terminal, so I'm not sure how any terminal client would do that, as it's all monospace. 😄
@rl_dane oh, TIL about ^G
Oct 24, 2026, 9:13 PMI'd rather have it still in the terminal, and totally keyboard-driven. I just like scrollbars as visual indicators.
IIRC, HP-UX's swinstall (or possibly AIX's smit(ty); it was a long time ago) and related commandline tools had their own pager that had some kind of visual ASCII scrollbar.
Something like:
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou ↑
be a breeder of sinners? I am myself │
indifferent honest, but yet I could │
accuse me of such things that it were │
better my mother had not borne me: I am │
very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with │
more offenses at my beck than I have │
thoughts to put them in, imagination to █
give them shape, or time to act them in. │
What should such fellows as I do │
crawling between earth and heaven? We │
are arrant knaves all; believe none of │
us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. ↓
@rl_dane yeah, dialog/whiptail does that for text fields as well I think, and Turbo Vision, but outside of those I’d find it weird.
Would be okay to have it as an option, of course.
Oct 25, 2026, 4:37 AMI found out that -m causes the percentage to remain in the bottom row. Even for streams, a simple Ggg will zip to the bottom and then back to the top to calculate the percentage (assuming that the stream has EOF'ed by that point)
Very happy find.
Now my LESS variable is "-miXFR --wordwrap"
@rl_dane Does less not offer a percentage so that you can get insight on how far in a document you are?
Oct 24, 2026, 9:26 PMIt does, only if viewing a file (not a stream), and only temporarily, after pressing Ctrl-G.
OH WAIT! less -m causes it to be persistent! HUZZAH!
But it still doesn't work for streams. :/
OH WAIT #2! If you go the end of a stream and then back up, the percent gets populated! SICK!!!
lol #RTFM TO THE MOOOOOONNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!
Oct 24, 2026, 9:30 PMOct 24, 2026, 9:33 PMSo now my $LESS variable (so you can set your less preferences easily in your .bashrc) is:
LESS="-miXFR --wordwrap"
--wordwrap is a fairly recent and wonderful inclusion-m, again, keeps the status bar persistent-i is for case-insensitive search-X basically prevents less from clearing the screen (helpful along with -F)-F causes less to exit if the output is less than a screenful-R allows some control characters to poke through
Oct 24, 2026, 9:36 PMOct 24, 2026, 9:37 PMYou might have to compile it from source, but that's fairly easy to do.
Oct 24, 2026, 9:38 PMOct 25, 2026, 4:35 AMWhen Debian still shipped an older version that didn't have --wordwrap, I had something like this in my .bashrc:
less --help |grep -q -- --wordwrap && LESS+=' --wordwrap'
For a more POSIX/ksh-friendly version:
less --help |grep -q -- --wordwrap && LESS="$LESS --wordwrap"
...or if you despise even a single unneeded fork() 😄
case $(less --help) in
*--wordwrap*) LESS="$LESS --wordwrap";;
esac
@rl_dane @amadaluzia After a few decades of using less, I did eventually figure out the `maG'a` idiom (set mark "a" at the current position, zip to end of stream, return to mark "a") to get a percentage progress.
Oct 25, 2026, 4:44 AMHuh, #TIL that less has marks like vi/ed! :D
@rl_dane @Screwtapello @amadaluzia A good day for me to be following the hashtag #til !
Oct 25, 2026, 4:57 AM@jmeowmeow @Screwtapello @amadaluzia
The hashtag that keeps on giving! 😄