Using Emacs for $PAGER?

Question

There are lots of places in UNIX where programs call out to the program in $PAGER (usually less or some similar command) to display some output. It\'s certainly tru

Answer 1

For general use of $PAGER, you might be interested in e-sink.

For the specific case of man pages, it's better to use Emacs's built-in man mode as you note. I have this in my .bashrc:

man () 
{ 
    if [ "$TERM" == "eterm-color" ]; then
        emacsclient -e "(man \"$1\")";
    else
        command man "$@";
    fi
}

Since you use shell-mode rather than ansi-term-mode like I do you will either have to make this use emacsclient all the time, or do something like (setenv "WITHIN_EMACS" "1") in your .emacs file so you can switch on $WITHIN_EMACS instead.