[Techtalk] anyone know of a simple text viewer?

[Akkana Peck]

> Miriam English wrote:
> > I often need to quickly look through the text files in a directory
> > without the need to edit them.

> for f in *.txt ; do leafpad "$f" ; done
> 
> This will loop through all the text files in a directory, one by one. Each
> time I press CTRL-Q to close the current window the next file opens another
> window. It's not exactly what I was looking for, but it is close.
> 
> Anybody know a simpler solution? Preferably one that opens files in the same
> window, one after another, and which when closed quits viewing any further
> files.

Well, I'm a commandline girl so I usually just do something like
less *.txt
which shows each file in the current terminal window.
Admittedly, less has an annoying habit of exiting if you type q
to get out of the current file, so you have to use :n to jump to
the next file. It's a little friendlier to use the same shell loop
you quoted above:

for f in *.txt ; do less "$f" ; done

Less is so much faster than opening a GUI window for each file
(is part of why I like commandline tools).

If you want it in a separate window, so (as you mention) you can
close the window to quit viewing any more files, you could open it
in another terminal:

xterm -e 'for f in .??* ; do less "$f" ; done'

(or use your favorite terminal if not xterm).

But I guess I'm not entirely clear what your goals are. What
improvements were you looking for over the leafpad solution?
Faster? Better UI for scrolling through the file?

        ...Akkana