Rich as a drop-in replacement for "more"/"less"

[daniel-kun]

This is a feature request, sort of.

I think that rich is awesome, and I intuitively wanted to use rich as a replacement of less, which I usually use to have a quick look at text files from my terminal.

However, plain rich behaves more like cat in that it prints all the stuff to the console and then exits. However - this is of course a personal opinion, but maybe the majority of rich users think the same way - I'd much prefer to have rich use --pager by default.

So my question is: Wouldn't it make sense to have rich use the pager by default when in an interactive terminal, and fall back to plain cat-behaviour when used e.g. in pipes or something?

Sure, I could solve this with an alias. But I really think that maybe this could be a useful default behaviour for the majority.

Thanks for the great work on rich and the other related toolkits! 🚀

[davep]

In case it helps: I use rich the other way around, petty much. I still use less as my pager (I've been using it for enough decades that I can't stop typing it), but I use rich as the LESSOPEN to render things nicely. See this bit of code in my fish config.

[gl-yziquel]

Well, I'd like to be able to do | rich --pager - when I need to. Unfortunately, what is fed to stdin (as I do with less or batcat) conflicts with the keystrokes I use to scroll down. less and bat/batcat do not have this problem.

There is a need to have rich behave as less. (In my case, massaging pdf files with mutool to display them as text and then paging it with rich formatting; all that as a one liner.)

[Aaron-Fine]

I recommend solving this by adding an "integrations" section (or similar) to the main Readme and include the snippet from @davep for fish and the following for bash (adapted directly from what @davep already did):

if hash rich 2>/dev/null;
then
    export LESSOPEN="|rich --force-terminal  %s"
    export LESS="--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS"
fi