Pijul

Using a pure Rust pager

Development
#1

Recently I made a discussion on using a pager for log/diff/credit output. This has been implemented using the pager crate. But there is a severe issue with this implementation: Windows support.

As with pager and the current implementation, it requires less to be available: which is not present in Windows. You either have to package less or do something like what git does; packaging the GNU coreutils.

This could prove really difficult to release and maintain. I think the best approach would be to write a small, asynchronous, message-passing based pager

This would not have the issue of hang ups as that happened with the moins crate

I am currently working on a prototype
What do you think @pmeunier

#2

I understand pager does nothing if less isn’t found, so you’re right that there is no Windows support.

I think you’re totally right that we don’t want to package GNU coreutils, and Rust makes it possible to include a crate, which is what you’re suggestion.

I think this is an ambitious project, and I totally support you. You could try to focus on Windows-only support first, since making a portable pager sounds really hard.

It doesn’t even have to take its input from stdin, but from an arbitrary instance of Read + Seek.

#3

You almost got my point.

First, the crate going to be a library. It will have a function like init, which would essentially switch to the alternate screen of the terminal and return the transmitter part of a channel. It will also start two asynchronous jobs, one to check if the recipient has data, and second to check for key pressure. The data could be any type that implements std::fmt::Display

The concept may not make sense or be clear right now. This will though, once it reaches a mature state and I have some working examples

Also a kind request to everyone here, if anyone is interested to actively contribute, I really welcome it

Here’s the link to the repo (It’s actually empty as I didn’t pushed to it)

I am not currently hosting it on the Nest because of two reasons

  • It’s not mature and I will not publish it crates.io until it’s ready
  • The only other option that Cargo has is git
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#4

FWIW, I use this as a pager, and it happens to be rust-based: