linux - Can less wrap lines like fmt does?

07
2014-07
  • Psychonaut

    Like most people I use less as my terminal pager. Occasionally I view files consisting of very long lines of plain or marked-up text. By default less folds these lines at the terminal window edge. That is, words get broken at the last column, making the text difficult to read. Is there any way of getting less to instead wrap the lines at word boundaries, the same way that fmt or Emacs visual line mode does?

    I am aware that I could simply pipe the input through fmt before viewing it, though that requires me to know my terminal width in advance. I was hoping there was some way of getting less to nicely wrap lines, and to automatically reformat them when the terminal window is resized.

  • Answers
  • dulange

    Excerpt from the less man page:

    -S or --chop-long-lines
        Causes lines longer than the screen width to be chopped rather than folded.
        That is, the portion of a long line that does not fit in the screen width
        is not shown. The default is to fold long lines; that is, display the
        remainder on the next line.
    

  • Related Question

    linux - Incremental searching with the `less` utility
  • hasenj

    Does less have an incremental search?

    I'm on xubuntu.


  • Related Answers
  • John T

    Unfortunately the less pager does not have this functionality. The only search options available are / for a forward search, and ? for a backward search.

  • user23307

    You can use view (vim in read only mode) as a replacement for less.. vim has incremental search, just add:

    set incsearch
    

    to your .vimrc

  • Matt McClure

    I added incremental search to less and pushed it to a fork on GitHub.