====== Get the most out of your shell ======
<style float-left>{{gravatar>yann.hodique@gmail.com}}</style>
There are some commands you use so often that you would not think there is room for improvement there. Some time ago, I discovered [[http://www.jedsoft.org/most/|most]], which is a pager meant as a replacement for ''less'' (which was already a replacement for ''more'', life is highly cyclic).
''most'' is nice because of its sane features and keybindings (where "sane" is a synonym for "emacs-like")
Among other features, it allows to split windows, to scroll horizontally, act as ''tail'' and so on. Also, it has a nice ncurses interface that displays useful information and colors.
A standard place for ''most'' is as the default pager, for example for viewing ''man'' pages.

  export PAGER=most

This is what it looks like. Nice isn't it ?

{{ blog:most.png |most in action}}

And... it allows editing. Well, not directly.
Ever wanted to just have a look at a file, yes really, and then oh, if only I could change this line... Let's quit ''less'', and open this file under ''emacs''.
[[http://www.stallman.org/saint.html|Saint Ignucius]] would probably say I'm not a **true believer** and that I deserve my fate it I'm not using ''emacs'' as a pager, or even better as a shell. But still... it happens to me all the time.
So, ''most'' allows one to define a ''MOST_EDITOR'' to be launched when hitting ''e'' while viewing a file. Now I have this in my ''.zshrc'' :

  export MOST_EDITOR='(file=%s; line=%d; emacsclient -t +$line $file -a zile +$line)'

The expression is a bit more complex than it should be because of a strange limitation : the filename (''%s'') must be **before** the line number (''%d'') in ''$MOST_EDITOR'', which is exactly the contrary of the requirements for using ''emacs'' or similar programs...
Anyway, what this command does is launch ''emacsclient'' in the current tty (using the neat multi-tty feature) in order to edit the current file at the current position. In case ''emacs'' is not running (which is admittedly rare), we fallback to ''zile'', an emacs-like lightweight editor.

{{tag>linux shell emacs}}

~~DISCUSSION~~