most: an alternative and powerful pager program
April 20th, 2007 edited by lucasEntry submitted by Emmanuel Bouthenot. DPOTD needs your help, please contribute !
Most is a powerful “pager”, similar to more and less. It is written in C using the slang library. It can display:
- compressed (bzip, gzip) files on the fly
- manpages with fancy output
- one or multiples files in windowed mode
- arbitrary binary files
Usage:
To use most as the default pager you can add this into your start-up user script (~/.bashrc, ~/.zshrc, etc.)
[ -x /usr/bin/most ] && export PAGER=most
You could also set it up to replace more and less:
[ -x /usr/bin/most ] && alias more=’most’ && alias less=’most’
Screenshots
Manpage view :
Windowed view of compressed files :
Binary file view:
Most has been available in Debian and Ubuntu for a long time now, and is well maintained.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:17 am
This program has got the most bizarre set of keyboard combination of
keyboard shortcuts. Some read like vi and some like emacs.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:00 am
To configure most as your system-wide pager, you can use as root :
update-alternatives –config pager and select most
April 20th, 2007 at 8:07 am
in /usr/share/doc/most/ , there is a configuration file lesskeys.rc that can used to get back most of less keyboard behaviour
April 20th, 2007 at 8:40 am
Nice program - reads binary files and archives without asking any questions :). Thanks for this post, lucas!
April 20th, 2007 at 9:23 am
Reminds me of Vern de Buergs ‘list’ for Dos and OS/2 from years ago.
April 20th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Nice one. Too bad it can’t handle debs. Will have to dig farther I guess
April 20th, 2007 at 2:49 pm
I added full UTF-8 support to most, but I’m not sure I agree with the assertion that it’s well maintained. I know upstream works on it every now and then, but the version in Debian/unstable, which I must say I use daily, is quite buggy and hasn’t changed since I last work on it over a year ago.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:04 pm
Thanks. Colored man pages and on-the-fly decoding of compressed files are both great.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
unfortunately search seems to don’t care about regular expressions such as \W…
April 21st, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Hmm, aren’t most of the features of most (haha) covered by less?
It’s got things like split windows over less, but the viewing of bzipped files, etc. are common to both.
See “INPUT PREPROCESSOR” in less man page.
October 6th, 2007 at 11:19 am
For colourful manual pages add these to your ~/.bashrc:
export PAGER=’/usr/bin/most -s’
export BROWSER=’/usr/bin/most -s’
I find it somewhat easier on the eyes to read long manual pages this way.
December 10th, 2008 at 10:02 am
You can give MOST use LESS-alike keybindins which is great.
I put instructions here http://jishin.blogspot.com/
February 23rd, 2009 at 11:09 pm
The lesskeys.rc file doesn’t contain bindings for HOME and END.
setkey bob “^[[7~”
setkey eob “^[[8~”
in my ~/.mostrc worked for me