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

["Randall S. Becker" <rsbecker@nexbridge.com>]

On June 28, 2021 3:02 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>Randall S. Becker wrote:
>> On June 28, 2021 2:12 PM, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >Felipe Contreras wrote:
>> >> 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.
>> >
>> >> 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.
>
>> 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?
>
>> 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.
>
>> >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.