It’s taken about a decade but I finally read the man page for “less.” Here are some important keyboard commands for navigating through files with it that I wanted to note for my own future use. If someone else gets a benefit from this, great, but it’s already helping me jump through man pages with more ease. (And it gave me an opportunity to write a post with a really ambiguous title.)
| Key | Function |
|---|---|
| f | Move forward one screen |
| b | Move backward one screen |
| j | Move forward one line |
| y | Move backward one line |
| = | Show the number of lines and your progress through the file |
| < | Move to the beginning of the file |
| > | Move to the end of the file |
| % | Scroll to the position in the file represented by the number before the percent sign |
These commands had eluded me for a long time, even though it would have been great to know them. After all, less is the default pager in Mac OS X. Thanks to the wonders of air travel, I had some time to read some off-line documentation.
Of course, I’ve long used “/” followed by some text to search through man pages, and that’s worth knowing if you don’t already. One useful trick I picked up was the search “/^EXAM” (props to Adam for mentioning the caret and making my recipe one character longer, but more specific) to search for the examples section.