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Comment by miah_ | Hacker News Reader

I just use 'view'; its the same as running 'vim -R'.

I find 'view' fine for things like looking at a logfile, but not great for one of my more common use-cases for a pager, which is looking at something from stdin that's either large or slow-to-produce. You have to wait until vim reads in the entire stream before you can do anything with it. With 'less' you can immediately navigate/search/etc. while the stream is still coming in.

Also, the default action of the cursor keys is more useful for paging in less than in view. In view, cursor keys move the cursor; in less, they scroll the screen.

And less has built-in tailing which you can start and stop at any time. That's its killer feature for me.

On the other hand, vim/view can have some nice syntax highlighting for syslog format log files. I haven't found that enough to switch though.

Have you tried using the less-like script distributed with vim? The path varies depending on your distribution of vim

  # ubuntu 14.04
  alias less='/usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.sh'

  # ubuntu 12.04: vim73, if I recall right
  alias less='/usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh'

This behaves like `less` in many ways, and uses your syntax highlighting from vim. My only complaint is that some things with escape codes for colors are not flattened, but instead you see the escape codes. (Diffs seem to work fine, at least.) It also appears to read the whole thing into vim, which is likely not what you want for large files.

I also use the 'vimcat' script from the vimpager project [0] as well. (I'm not sure why I haven't just used the whole thing. I must not have realized there was more when I first grabbed it.)

0: https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager/blob/master/vimcat

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