RE: How dow we educate our users to configure less?

On June 28, 2021 3:02 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

Randall S. Becker wrote:

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On June 28, 2021 2:12 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:

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Felipe Contreras wrote:

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It has been suggested that we "educate our users" to configure less
in the right way, instead of colorizing man pages ourselves [1].

The question is *how*? Nobody has answered that.

This is a continuation of the thread below.

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I am still waiting for an explanation.

How does the user properly colorize man pages for both man and git
in a way that works in all distributions?

No response.

I think you're looking for something does not exist because it is
platform and environment dependent.

Yes, but there's always some common denominator.

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There are two ways to configure git to work with 'less' on NonStop and
neither is identical to Ubuntu or Windows.

But I'm not talking about configuring git to work with less.

Once you have less configured, how do you add colors? For example how do you turn bold into red bold?

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Don't even get me started on what less does in a TSO/ISPF environment
where everything is some single colour on black unless your emulator
supports 3279 emulation.

Is it even possible to add color there? I'm talking about platforms where color is possible in the first place.

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It's safe to say at this point that nobody knows what that configuration would look like.

Nobody, perhaps, knows how to do this on every platform in the known
universe 😊. There is no "one way" to do this consistently everywhere.

In the platforms where color is supported, and you have less, what does this do?

 LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\e[1;31m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\e[m' git help git

This only works in bash/shell. So if you are not initiating from a shell, you cannot use this technique.