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eless is a combination of Bash script and a minimal emacs view-mode config.

This script is designed to:

Be portable – Just one bash script to download to run

Be independent of a user’s emacs config You can still customize the eless config if you like.

Not require an emacs server to be already running

It was created out of a need to have something like less (in the sense of launch quickly, do, and quit), but better in these ways:

Syntax highlighting

Org-mode file rendering

A better navigable man page viewer

A better Info viewer

Dired, especially wdired (batch edit symbolic links, for example?)

(batch edit symbolic links, for example?) Colored diffs, git diff , git log , ls , etc. (auto ANSI detection)

, , , etc. (auto ANSI detection) Filter log files to only show (or not show) lines matching a regexp

Auto-revert log files when I want (like tail -f )

) Quickly change frame and font sizes

.. and more; basically everything that emacs has to offer!

I call it eless and here’s a little taste of what it looks like:

Shown above, starting from top left image and proceeding clock-wise..

eless eless.org

rg --color=ansi 'man pages' | eless (rg?)

(rg?) man grep (I have set my PAGER env var to eless .)

(I have set my env var to .) info eless (I have aliased info to '\info \!* | eless' in my tcsh shell.)

(I have aliased to in my tcsh shell.) eless . (Shows the current directory contents in dired .)

(Shows the current directory contents in .) diff of eless.org with an older saved version and piping the result to eless

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