Hello:

This is my first message here, although I've been reading these forums from time to time for the last years, when I was looking for solutions to some of my problems. So salutes to you all and thanks for your help .

I'm using the command "less" with line wrapping enabled. In the past, I didn't like to use this feature when reading code that used lines longer than 80 characters, because it was hard to follow the flow of the wrapped lines. I only used it when reading prose. So I used the arrows keys to move through the text (a nightmare) or re-formatted the code by hand to fit in the screen. But I've not enough time to re-format all the legacy code that I've to read, so I'm trying to accustom my eyes and brain to line wrapping.

One problem of line wrapping is that it's hard to see where each line starts. In "vim", if I enable the line numbering, this gives me a hint of that. But with "less", enabling the line numbering repeats the line number in each "piece" of the same line. So there's no visual hint (and it performs bad in big files). But is there a way to show a marker in each line start?

I've though of using "view" (a.k.a. "vim -R"; "vim" in read-only mode), but people say that "less" is best for reading big files (logs, for example).

Thank you!

read "man less" - if the feature is there, it is there, if it isn't, it isn't.

it is possible to use a different pager, though:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=linux+alte...ore+less+pager

you can also try to use most

How about cat -n file | less ?

Apologizes for answering so late, but I've been quite busy.

Thank you all for showing me some alternatives to "less" . I had already discarded using "more" because is very limited for my use. But these days I've been doing some experiments with "most".

I've liked it. It has some features that "less" lacks, such as splitting the window, which may be really useful. This program effectively marks the lines that have been wrapped. What's the problem? That it marks them in the right-most column instead of the left-most column. If you're reading a language that flows from left to right, it's little useful. Because it costs to skip lines quickly. It's a shame, because "most" has some features that are very useful. If I could change the location of that column...

With regard to your solution, Hydrurga, I like it. But I would prefer something that highlighted the line starts. Because, when you're printing the results of a database query, for example, the line numbers mixes with the real numbers of the output and it's complicated to read it.

Just this morning, I've thought about a solution that allows me to highlight each line start. And it seems to work well with the 3 mentioned pagers. It consists in using Perl to inject a coloured marker at the start of each line:

This adds a red bigger-than symbol and a white space, at the start of each line.

Then, with "less", I could even set the LESSOPEN variable to this value, so that it marked the line starts by default:

Thank you.

nice find. I like it!
If you think your problem is solved please mark the thread solved.

On my system the -N seems to add 8 characters (line number plus padding) which doesn't seem to get compensated for.

$ COLUMNS=72 less -N .bash_history

You can toggle --chop-long-lines aka -S with [-] [S] [Enter] while less is running. Otherwise [Right Arrow] and [Left Arrow] let you shift over to see extras. The -S options seems to be ON by default. When the line wraps (-S is OFF), and the line number is repeated on the wrapped lines.