[Techtalk] anyone know of a simple text viewer?

[Miriam English]

Thanks Meryll. As you and Akkana point out, the commandline is probably 
the best way to approach this, in lieu of a simple GUI program.

Best wishes,

     - Miriam


Meryll Larkin wrote:
> Weird.  The first thing I thought was :
>
> cat, head, tail.
>
> for f in *.txt; do
>     echo "${f}:"
>     cat $f |grep -v "^$" | head -n15
>     echo "-----------------"
>     echo
> done
>
> No tail in this one but it depends on what you are looking for.
> For example, if you know you need to see the last few lines of a file.
>
> Meryll
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Akkana Peck [mailto:akkana at shallowsky.com]
> Sent: Friday, July 19, 2019 7:54 AM
> To: techtalk at linuxchix.org
> Subject: Re: [Techtalk] anyone know of a simple text viewer?
>
>> 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
>
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