Is it possible to keep the output of less on the screen after quitting?
For Git specifically, this can be handled with the following
git config --global color.ui true
git config --global core.pager 'less -Xr'
To prevent less
from clearing the screen on exit you can start it with the option -X
:
less -X FILE
If you want to pass this option automatically to every instance of less, you can set the LESS
environment variable accordingly in your ~/.zshrc
:
export LESS="-X"
Note: If your shell has syntax coloring enabled, the
-X
option will cause your less output to display those color change escape sequences as inlineESC
text.
This can be fixed by also passing theraw-control-chars
display option,-r
. For example:export LESS="-Xr"
This also includes instances where less
is started by another program, for example man
. If you want to disable this option for a single command, you can just prepend LESS=
. For example
LESS= man less