[bayindirh]

> Do people widely agree with this? That sounds less like 'exploitation' to me and more like 'the way Unix works'.

I personally don't. UNIX is made to be composable, and it's composition. more, less, most all consider pipe input as first-class citizens. I'm personally fond of "grep --color=always file.ext | less --raw" to page colored output.

> Is that really the best approach?

I don't think so. If I was the developer, I'd embed the pager only into the Windows build by default, and use system pagers on other systems (by default). If any person/distro wants to use the built-in pager, it'd be their choice.

I don't like when developers bloat their own code with good intentions, but drift from their nice state to something bloated.

[pie_flavor]

Bloat cannot mean large contributor to the code size, since it's a tiny portion of the binary and dwarfed by the regex, syntax highlighter, and (sigh) command-line parsing. It also cannot mean unwanted feature, since every single time I have ever used it to look at a file I have wanted it paged, and I can't think of a circumstance where I wouldn't want it paged (given that my terminal is already set up to work with pagers, and otherwise I'd be well acquainted with configuring things not to be paged). So I wonder what it could mean in this context. (Myself I am fond of not wasting the same twenty seconds over and over again typing bonus things.)

[bayindirh]

Bloat is generally code complexity, which slows down maintenance and development.

In this case, there's a new pager library, conditional connections to the pager library, and possibly the whole shebang of supporting both internal and external pagers at the same time.

I seldom use bat, and I'm not hating it. Syntax highlighting and line numbering looks nice for the use cases I played with it, but I don't find chaining a couple of pipes together to get something exactly I want, a waste of time, esp. when mangling outputs of commands and taking actions according to these outputs.

Development and system administration calls for different conventions on the terminal, and I understand & respect how developers like to "enhance" their terminals to work faster. OTOH, after having both hats for a very long time, I find most (if not all) of these "enhancements" unnecessary because it's either distracting or getting in the way.

For the most tiring and most-used expressions, I use espanso to expand them on the terminal instantly, and I found that doing this gives me more flexibility without it being on my face.

Maybe this is because I can think further steps while typing something in, and I don't waste that time in a sense many people sees. Maybe we shouldn't strive to extract efficiency over every nanosecond of work, and maybe there's something happening we don't quite grasp in these moments we label as "waste".

IDK.;)