[Python-ideas] Cleaner separation of help() and interactive help.

[Ben Finney]

Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> writes:

> On 2/7/2011 3:21 PM, Ron Adam wrote:
>
> > It also can be annoying (to me) when I use help and the result is
> > cleared after the pager is done with it. […]
>
> ?? On windows, both the command prompt and IDLE shell windows keep the
> help text. I scroll up and down all the time. Multi-screen text would
> be pretty useless otherwise. I consider any other behavior buggy.

The default pager program on many GNU+Linux systems is ‘less’. The
default behaviour of ‘less’ when it quits is to restore the screen
contents to what they were before the program started.

Actually, I can't find any way to configure ‘less’ not to do that.

Of course, one can choose a different pager by setting the ‘PAGER’
environment variable::

    $ PAGER=more python
    Python 2.6.6 (r266:84292, Dec 27 2010, 10:20:06) 
    [GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
    Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
    >>> import os
    >>> help(os)

but I'd prefer to keep ‘less’ and just fix its behaviour on quit. Does
anyone know how?

-- 
 \     “Unix is an operating system, OS/2 is half an operating system, |
  `\    Windows is a shell, and DOS is a boot partition virus.” —Peter |
_o__)                                                        H. Coffin |
Ben Finney