Re: getting more out of man pages with less(1) (was: [bug #59962] soelim(1) man page uses pic diagram--should it?)

[Dave Kemper]

On 5/16/21, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robinson@gmail.com> wrote:
> At 2021-05-16T20:29:30-0500, Dave Kemper wrote:
>> less's default is for searches to be case-sensitive.  Its -i option
>> (which can be given on the command line or while less is running) is
>> what activates the behavior described above.  A user or a distro might
>> make -i the default in their environment (I do) through the $LESS
>> environment variable or an alias, but that isn't less's out-of-the-box
>> behavior.
>
> On my Debian buster-based system, less(1) behaves that way, but $LESS is
> not defined in my environment and I don't have a shell alias or function
> set up.  Checking the source package, I don't see patches to turn -i on
> by default.  Baffling!

Maybe less's build system has a switch to compile in a different
default?  Maybe this is a recent change?  Maybe I'm completely wrong?
I haven't looked at the source or built it myself from github; I'm
going by the behavior on my systems, behavior I've observed on other
systems, and the wording of the man page (which documents "-i" to
invoke case-mostly-insensitive searches rather than an option to
switch to case-sensitive ones).