On Wed, 24 Jan 2007, Mark Nudelman wrote:

The first issue that you mention (that we move to the bottom of the screen
before printing the first line) is behavior that has always existed in less.

BTW, this issue is documented as enhancement request #112 at
http://www.greenwoodsoftware.com/less/bugs.html.

I don't dispute that the "move to the bottom of the screen" is probably a 
good feature in general, but it is _not_ a good feature when -F is in 
effect (similar to the init/exit sequence being a horrible thing to do 
when -F is in effect).

So the problem is that it basically makes -F largely useless.. The whole 
_point_ of anybody using -F is that it turns off the "pager" feature for 
small output that fits on a page, wouldn't you say?

(The reason the init/exit sequence doesn't mix with -F is that many 
terminal descriptions basically have a "switch to secondary screen" for 
init, and "switch back" for exit, which means that together with -F, small 
output simply won't be shown at all - or perhaps it just flickers too 
quickly for the user to see it).

So this really is only a -F issue.

Now, for the init/exit sequence, at least we have -X to turn that off (and 
git does indeed default to using "FRSX" if the user doesn't have any LESS 
environment variable set), so perhaps the "move to end of screen" could 
also get another flag? That way it would be something that users can 
control - but see above on why I pretty much guarantee that anybody who 
uses -F would want to use the new flag too.

Your second issue is definitely a bug.  Less's handling of -F and eof in
general is indeed rather baroque and confusing, and probably needs a complete
revision.  Some of the complexity comes from being portable to many (not
necessarily Unix-like) systems.

Yeah, I tried to look at the sources, and ran awya screaming ;)

		Linus