less colors for man pages

Posted by Nico Golde in
Monday, July 2. 2007

I recently wrote how to use terminfo to get colored manpages.
Today ft came up with a nice feature of less which enables you to set termcap colors by environment variables.

Just use

export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'

in your ~/.$SHELLrc to get the same effect without having a terminfo file.

And again for all the people writing "Install most and set it as PAGER", I know about this but using most because it has colors instead of less is just stupid since less has way more features most doesn't have. D'oh this sounds really strange

UPDATE: from strcat's comment. FOO_TERMCAP can be for all programs which compiled/linked with/against termcap. See man 5 termcap for definitions.

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It's not really undocumented. FOO_TERMCAP can be for all programs which compiled/linked with/against termcap

#1 strcat (Homepage) on 2007-07-02 23:31 (Reply)

thanks! fixed.

#2 nion on 2007-07-02 23:55 (Reply)

Where is FOO_TERMCAP documented?

#3 Eric on 2007-07-03 03:54 (Reply)

There is, BTW, another Program which can display colorized manpages. It's called vim.

Since Debian, unfortunately, doesn't support the MANPAGER environment variable (as opposed to, say, Mac OS X), you'll have to write a Shell script such as ~/bin/pager.sh:

#!/bin/sh
col -b | vim -R -c 'set ft=man nomod nolist ignorecase' -

and then, in your dotfiles:

alias man='man -P pager.sh'

#4 Michael Goetze on 2007-07-03 11:20 (Reply)

Why? $VIMRUNTIME/macros/less.sh exist.

#5 strcat (Homepage) on 2007-07-03 12:08 (Reply)

yes exactly, vim has this already. but i don't really like it, it has the drawback to exit on space if you are at the end of a document.

#6 nion on 2007-07-03 17:28 (Reply)

Great - thanks!

#7 CentronX (Homepage) on 2007-07-05 00:07 (Reply)

is it possible to teach less to syntax highlight source code?

#8 cats on 2007-07-12 02:48 (Reply)

With lesspipe.sh u can.

#8.1 strcat (Homepage) on 2007-07-12 09:06 (Reply)

One more reason to love you... err, your blogs! I have linked them to mine (just started, I don't know if you like my opinions, but check back later, there will be on many subjects, very much inluding *nix stuff like shell scripting...

btw, I'm working on usblock.sh - you might want to check it out, though v. 0.1b has a lot that sucks, 0.2b will be there soon, it will work better, less complicatedly, yet will offer reprogramming support through configuration file - hard to explain the point, but I think you will like it even if you laugh at how 0.1b is made

The blog is on my site, surprisingly under "HackNBlog" link on menu

#9 Jani Saksa (Homepage) on 2007-10-20 19:45 (Reply)

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