kevinwaddle / eless

A Better 'less' - Combination of bash script and a minimal emacs view-mode config - Created using Org Babel

Eless - A Better Less

ShellCheck Status:

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Documentation: Org exported HTML | Wiki

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eless is a combination of Bash script and a minimal emacs view-mode config.

This script is designed to:

• Be portable – Just one bash script to download to run
• Be independent of a user’s emacs config
  • You can still customize the =eless= config if you like.
• Not require an emacs server to be already running

It was created out of a need to have something like less (in the sense of launch quickly, do, and quit, but better in these ways:

• Syntax highlighting
• Org-mode file rendering
• A better navigable man page viewer
• A better Info viewer
• Dired, especially wdired (batch edit symbolic links, for example?)
• Colored diffs, git diff, git log, ls, etc. (auto ANSI detection)
• Filter log files to only show (or not show) lines matching a regexp
• Auto-revert log files when I want (like tail -f)
• Quickly change frame and font sizes
• .. and more; basically everything that emacs has to offer!

I call it eless and here’s a little taste of what it looks like:

Shown above, starting from top left image and proceeding clock-wise..

• eless eless.org
• rg --color=ansi 'man pages' | eless (rg?)
• man grep (I have set my PAGER env var to eless.)
• info eless (I have aliased info to =’\info \!* | eless’= in my tcsh shell.)
• eless . (Shows the current directory contents in dired.)
• diff of eless.org with an older saved version and piping the result to eless

As a bonus:

• This script passes ShellCheck, and
• Unofficial Bash strict mode is enabled.
• Always-in-sync documentation as the eless script and documentation are generated using Org Babel from one file (even this README).

Try it out

Here are some usage examples:

eless foo.txt               # Open foo.txt in eless in terminal (-nw) mode by default.
eless foo.txt --gui         # Open foo.txt in eless in GUI mode.
echo 'foo' | eless          #
echo 'foo' | eless -        # Same as above. The hyphen after eless does not matter; is anyways discarded.
grep 'bar' foo.txt | eless  #
PAGER=eless man grep        # Launches man pages in eless (terminal mode), if the environment variable PAGER is set to eless.
PAGER=eless man grep --gui  # Launches man pages in eless (GUI mode), if the environment variable PAGER is set to eless.
diff foo bar | eless        # Colored diff!
diff -u foo bar | eless     # Colored diff for unified diff format
eless .                     # Open dired in the current directory (enhanced 'ls')
ls --color=always | eless   # Auto-detect ANSI color codes and convert those to colors
PAGER=eless git diff        # Show git diff with ANSI coded colors
eless -h | eless            # See eless help ;-)
info emacs | eless          # Read emacs Info manual in eless
eless foo.tar.xz            # Read the contents of archives; emacs does the unarchiving automatically

Contributors

• Thanks to Iqbal Ansari for adding support to read piped data in emacs -Q -nw.
• Thanks to Adam Porter for adding a bash collapsing function for debug statements, and testing out and providing suggestions on improving the eless build flow.