Surprised they missed follow! It’s a bit odd to use, but once you get used to it it’s better than tail in many circumstances IMO. `less +F` starts less following stdin or whatever file argument you’ve provided. <C-c> breaks following, allowing you to search around a business-as-usual `less` session. Hitting `F` (that’s uppercase) starts following again. Yes, you can just start following within a session with `F` too if you forgot to add +F to the `less` invocation.

Also -X or --no-init

" ... desirable if the deinitialization string does something unnecessary, like clearing the screen."

I prefer to not clear the screen. I usually want to continue to refer to something or even copy/paste from the content to my current command line.

The tip that I've been using quite a lot lately by debugging long log files is using `&` to filter what I want to read and `&!` to filter-out what's not useful (and they support regexes).

Admittedly, they are a bit slow sometime and sure, you could use `grep -v` then pipe which is way faster, but they've saved me on removing noise from logfiles from time to time when you don't always know what to filter beforehand :).

EDIT: It was in TFA.

Don't forget that you can enable syntax highlighting/file rendering(like pdf, markdown) in less with lesspipe https://github.com/wofr06/lesspipe. It is exteremely useful and improves readability a lot. What's nice is that this functionality is typically disabled in pipes, so you can be sure that your script will behave as intended.

Two things that have helped me a lot of times:

-L: skip preprocessing the input file. When opening rotated log files with the names like logfile.1, logfile.2... the default preprocessor on some distros will recognize them as man page source and helpfully pipe through nroff. If the file is largish this introduces an annoying pause. Using -L skips all that.

Ctrl-R as the first character of a search string will search for that literal string, not the regular expression. Nice if you have regex metacharacters in the search string and don't want to bother with escaping (and don't need the regex facilities, of course.)

Less can be configured with a ~/.lesskey file

I have a single line in my config[1] which binds s to back-scroll, so that d and s are right next to each other and I can quickly page up/down with one hand.

If you’re on macOS, you may not be able to use this unless you install less from Homebrew, or otherwise replace the default less.[2]

[1] https://github.com/jez/dotfiles/blob/master/lesskey#L2

[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/27269/is-less1-mis...

You can also press `s` to save data from a pipe to a file rather than manually copy pasting.

> The ! lets you invoke an external command.

Also useful for privilege escalation...

If a script running as root uses less (or vi), just do "!bash" and you have a root shell. Note that systems that let you do this are usually pretty weak, and there are often many other ways to get root access, but this is a particularly simple one that I used a few times in the past.

> I've got more less tips than the Bible's got Psalms

But there are (at least) 150 Psalms! You're going to need more less tips to match that.

I like less and found that https://github.com/noborus/ov can be a good modern alternative to it.

Some of these come intuitively when you know how to use vim. I expect to be able to search when pressing / in terminal programs, just like I expect Ctrl+F to work in GUIs.

There -R to quit if the file is less than the screen size. There's also most as an alternative pager, and also glow (of course which, my fork of it is better) to render md files in the terminal.

s/assorted/useful/