Syntax Highlighting Pager

Look for bat: A cat(1) clone with wings.

bat supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.

It is not a pager, but it automatically redirects output to less if needed.

less -R shows ANSI color sequences as-is (instead of expanding to caret notation). That'll make syntax highlighting work!

You can also create an environment variable LESS=-R to make this the default behavior. Similarly for other options; see man less.

Might I suggest vimpager?

First off, recent vim distributions (I believe 6.0 and above) come with a pager-esque-mode script. It's quite simple and functional, and operates similarly to less. Try: vim '+help less' +only.

Even better, however, Rafael Kitover has written a much more robust and powerful script called vimpager. It's available on GitHub (or vimscripts). If you are on OS X and using Homebrew, it's as easy as brew install vimpager.

At that point, you can simply set $PAGER=vimpager, or even alias less=vimpager. It works excellently.

You might try using jed. Yes, it's a text editor, not a pager, but it's quite lightweight and the default install contains excellent colorschemes for a wide variety of file types and languages.