CODEWITHSUNDEEP
unix
Juniper Belmont
Juniper Belmont

Reputation: 3574

In the less pager, is there a way to show more lines before a search result?

I often search within less, but it puts the search result to the very top of the screen, which makes reading man pages difficult, since I'm searching for a word, but I really want to see the flag connected to that description, which might be a few lines up.

Is there a way to show more lines at the top of the screen, so that the cursor is something like 5-10 lines below the top of the screen? Something like vim's scrolloff option.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 631

Answers (2)

00prometheus
00prometheus

Reputation: 839

To show more lines of context before the search result, i.e. to place the search result a few lines down from the top of the screen instead of the top line, use:

less -jX

where X is the number of lines below the top of the screen where you want your results to end up.

If you usually prefer this style of search results, and want less to use it all the time (for example in man), put the option in the $LESS environment variable. For example, to always place the search result 5 lines down, using bash, that will be:

export LESS=-j5

You can of course add any other options to less in the $LESS environment variable too if you like.

Upvotes: 1

Buffered
Buffered

Reputation: 46

Sounds like you want the -j option. For example, less -j5 would put a search result on line 5.

For man you'll need to set the PAGER environment variable to include the -j.

Upvotes: 3

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