"more" command alternative that does support colors?
colors, command-line, linux, ncurses, shell
Solution
Most commands that can output color have an option to choose between:
- ON: Always output color
- OFF: Never output color
- AUTO: Show color if and only if the output is a terminal
Many commands work automatically in color AUTO mode. That is the case for `emerge`. And that is why you do not have color when you pipe the output: the pioe is not a terminal.
The solution is to tell `emerge` to output the colors unconditionally. And tell `less` not to filter them, of course.
Try:
emerge --color y | less -R
Problem
This is in my top 10 list of tiny annoying things in Linux. I love colored output in terminals: it's nice to see and useful when reading. The first thing I do on a new system is to set aliases for both `ls` and `grep` to show colored output, and the second is to install `vim` and `htop`. I use both Gentoo and Ubuntu, and I see that `emerge`, the package manager of Gentoo, has a higher readability than `apt-get/aptitude` just because it uses way much more color output than the latter. So, whenever I have to pipe an `emerge` command with `more`, all the color is lost and I have to focus my attention on every line to avoid missing anything important. I can understand that a basic command such as `more` shouldn't depend on `ncurses` (someone could argue that we also have `less`, so one of the two could be even color-friendly), but why there isn't a famous alternative to `more` that supports colors, as there is for `vi/vim`, `top/htop` etc.? Thanks for any hint.