The Name less Is a Joke

Before less there was more, a pager born at the end of the 1970s. It moved forward one screen at a time, and that was all: there was no going back. Scroll past the part you wanted and your only option was to open the file again.

In the 1980s, Mark Nudelman wrote a pager that could scroll backwards. The name less came from a colleague, as a joke on "backwards more." It also happens to echo the saying "less is more," with a second punchline folded inside: this less does considerably more than more ever did.

And less is everywhere now. The screen you land in when you open a manual with man is, on most systems, less. That is why / searches it and q closes it. Learn the keys for less, and you have learned the keys for reading manuals.

Learn a key once and it keeps working somewhere else. The terminal is built that way.