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© 2020 Dylan DiGeronimo
Least is a minimal, less-inspired paging application written in Rust, using pancurses.
Its intention is not to outperform less, either in terms of speed or features, although that would be a nice eventual goal. Instead, I'm creating it as a means of getting to learn an interesting technology that I don't get to use in my everyday work. As such, there'll probably be a good amount of code that's amateur-ish, but I'm going to try my best to follow Rust conventions as I learn them.
The functionality is also not intended to be a total clone of less, with the controls being geared toward my personal preferences. I'm also making a point of not looking at the less source code while I build this. Least isn't a direct translation of less from C to Rust - it's a reinterpretation that happens to be written in a different language.
least is licensed under the MIT license, so feel free to download it, fork it, modify it, use it, love it, hate it, etc. You do you.
- git
- A working Rust installation, including cargo
- An ncurses library for your OS
$ git clone https://github.com/ddigeronimo/least.git
$ cargo build --release
For a development build, use
$ cargo build
After building, the executable will be located at {installLocation}least/target/release/least. Open a text file with $ least {filename}. Make sure to set least as executable, set its permissions as needed, and add it to your path (consider copying it to a ~/bin directory).
- Controls:
- q - Quit
- h - Open help page
- j, Down - Down one line
- k, Up - Up one line
- d, PgDn - Down half a screen
- u, PgUp - Up half a screen
- g - Jump to top of file
- o - Open a new file (expands tildes and environment variables with shellexpand and supports symlinks)
- / - Search
- ? - Reverse search
- n - Jump to next search result
- N - Jump to previous search result
- Command line flags:
- -h, --help - Prints help page to command line
- Basic file loading
- Error handling now added
- Now the in-program file opening functionality allows filenames of practically indefinite length (in practice this is limited by the size of the i32 used to track input string length)
- Search highlighting
None of these are guarantees, but you might see them in the future
- Search UX improvements:
- "No results found" message
- Prefix search term with "/"
- Clear previous search input
- Jump to specific line
- Optimized file loading (if needed for performance reasons)
- V1: Load lines as needed
- V2: Add buffer functionality
- Number prefixing for movement commands
- Automatic release building via Github Actions
- Improved project structure
All clear for now!