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  • mirabilos🐈‍⬛mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
    Oct 24, 2026, 9:01 PM

    @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

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  • R.L. Dane :Debian: :FreeBSD: :OpenBSD: :NetBSD:🍵 :MiraLovesYou:rl_dane@polymaths.social
    Oct 24, 2026, 9:24 PM

    @mirabilos

    What 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) ←██████────────→
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  • mirabilos🐈‍⬛mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:04 PM

    @rl_dane

    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 😹

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  • R.L. Dane :Debian: :FreeBSD: :OpenBSD: :NetBSD:🍵 :MiraLovesYou:rl_dane@polymaths.social
    Oct 24, 2026, 9:13 PM

    @mirabilos

    I'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.            ↓
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  • mirabilos🐈‍⬛mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org
    Oct 24, 2026, 10:03 PM

    @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.

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