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There are many things that are simply not possible to do on the CLI. Take for example an indicator bar that shows notches for any lines in the file that matches a search term. That would be relatively straightforward in a GUI but quite difficult to render on the CLI, even with a curses interface.

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If it can do that it isn't tail... it becomes a pager. Which can do that

What kind of CLI pager does that? Legitimately curios.

emacs occur effectively does this... you get another pane to the right with a list of all ocurrences and you can use that to navigate up and down your file. Scrollbars wouldn't work because you may have far too few rows on the tty. less et al highlight everything in the current page and so on. emacs et al will tell you how many matches are left. grep too.

Incidentally intellij does this and i find it of limited use. Perhaps just not how my mind works. The occur mode is far more sensible to me.

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