April 15, 2026
When less isn’t more
I made a terminal pager
New text scroller sparks a fight: cool passion project or upgrade to the old standby
TLDR: A developer built “lore,” a simple tool to read long terminal text his way. The community split fast: doubters say it’s just a learning project compared to the classic, while fans praise the clear explanations about text handling and bring jokes—showing developer tools stir real passion.
A developer built “lore,” a new terminal text scroller (think: a window to read long output inside that black, code-y box). And the crowd? Spicy. The loudest chorus says this is “reinventing the wheel,” with skeptics arguing it’s mostly a learning project when the classic tool, less, already exists. But a passionate defense emerges: fans rave that the post offers the clearest explanation of how computers count letters and symbols (hello, UTF‑8), and cheer the maker’s focus on building something he’ll actually use every day.
The drama pivots on a familiar tech split: craft your own tool vs. use the old reliable. Curious voices press for receipts: what, exactly, does this beat the old standby at? Supporters highlight the author’s emphasis on intuitive navigation and a reusable text-view component he can drop into his other projects. Then come the memes: one joker expected “more bubbles and tea” (a wink at a popular UI library), and another misread the title and thought it was about a dead man’s switch. Underneath the noise is a simple truth: many apps hand off long text to a helper program chosen by a setting, and arguments about which helper to use get surprisingly personal. In other words, it’s fresh toy vs. useful upgrade—and everyone’s got a take.
Key Points
- •The author built a reusable Go-based viewport component for navigating large text in terminal UIs.
- •Using this component, they created a new terminal pager called “lore,” which they now use daily.
- •The article explains how programs use the $PAGER environment variable to invoke a pager for multi-page text, typically when stdout is a TTY.
- •Common pagers and configurations are discussed, including less, cat, bat, most, delta, and variables like GIT_PAGER and BAT_PAGER.
- •Practical less options are highlighted, such as --no-init/-X to retain output after exit and --ignore-case/-i for case-insensitive search.