I made a terminal pager

CGamesPlay 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I am definitely waiting for a "modern less replacement" in the same vein as fd, sd, fzf, and the rest of the under-20yo cli crew. I get that "less" is reasonably maintained still.

I think the killer feature for me would be refresh. I get that this can't work for piped input, but I want `git diff` to show in a pager with a refresh button that holds my place. fzf supports both refresh and piped input, so perhaps there's some ideas there that could be leveraged.

	▲	zeech 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I went looking for a 'new' pager a couple years back and settled on this [0]. I've since gone back to `less` since it got annoying jumping between systems and having different pagers, but when I used it it was quite nice. [0] https://github.com/walles/moor

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ancientcatz 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If I remember correctly, `gum` also provides a pager feature: https://github.com/charmbracelet/gum

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netghost 3 hours ago | parent [-]

TIL about `gum`. I love this and endeavor to integrate it into something sometime. Thank you for mentioning it!

	▲	project2501a 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh, you will love all of charmbracelet https://github.com/charmbracelet

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jzer0cool an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Was curious but the git link there doesn't load?

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thegdsks 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How does this compare to less with syntax highlighting? I've been using bat as a pager (bat --paging=always) and it covers most of what I need. Curious what the advantage is for larger files.

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vomayank 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Interesting project.

What was the main limitation in existing pagers like less that pushed you to build a new one?

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lrobinovitch 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Author here!

If I were to give this post a longer title, it would be "I made a terminal pager because I needed a really good viewport component for my Go TUIs, then realized that a TUI viewport is just a mini terminal pager and I want the same text navigation and manipulation experience everywhere that I encounter long text blocks in my terminal".

I take no issue at all with `less`, it's super powerful and configurable as I call out in the post. I took the functionality I needed, made it a reusable component for Go TUIs, then made a terminal pager in the form of a Go TUI with it.

	▲	ghthor 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Still use Wander everyday <3

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gandreani 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I really like this post! I think it's the clearest explanation I've seen of the different characteristics of utf-8 strings

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pimlottc 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The TL;DR doesn’t really say what this new pager offers compared to less; it seems to mostly be a learning project:

> lore supports only a subset of what less does, but in a more intuitive and useful manner for my daily activity. I also find value in understanding it from the ground up, bytes to terminal views, and continuing to refine it as I learn more about what I actually want and need in a terminal pager.

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umutnaber 38 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

good work

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mnkyprskbd 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

bat is the king of pagers. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

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asibahi 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn’t it just call `less`?

	▲	joombaga 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yes. It calls the default pager (or whatever you specify).

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teki_one 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

bat does not look like a pager: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat?tab=readme-ov-file#automatic-...

	▲	teo_zero 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		In fact it's not. The name itself mimicks cat, not less. It's a filter that adds annotations to its input, such as syntax highlighting, git diffs and special-char coloring. Personally I can't find any use for bat: I'm a devote user of vim for editing, and it already does all of this, so why not using it to view files as well? It's satisfying to have the same interface, colors and shortcuts whether you're editing or viewing!

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saghm 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I like it a lot more than `less`, but unfortunately it's always a lot slower when first opening really large files. I'm not sure if it's eagerly loading the whole thing (maybe because that's needed for AST parsing in the case of syntax highlighting, although it happens even on files without highlighting), but there are times I have to swap to `less` still.

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dostick 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

From the title I thought it’s about a dead man’s switch.

	▲	nkoren 44 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I thought it was about replicating a mossad supply chain attack.

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jauntywundrkind 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's not great but I made a typescript library to wrap pickers recently, such as skim, fuzzel, fzf, dmenu, rofi, etc. Some very similar problems.

Would love if anyone has thoughts or suggestions. It was quick and dirty, and works fine for my use, but I'm not sure where else I could take this, how else I might splice apart the problem, what else would suit it. https://tangled.org/jauntywk.bsky.social/picker-power

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fragmede 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A Splunk, a Splunk! My kingdom for a Splunk!

(too bad Cisco bought them and made it too expensive).

Also, no "less does more than more and most does more than less" joke?

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sourcegrift 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also called `vi -`

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cocodill 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

For a bubbletea application I'd expect more bubbles and tea there. But still, nice project.