Re: redisplay system of emacs

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
> Date: Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:01:19 +0900
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
>  > > log files, there's nothing like (X)Emacs!
> 
>  > less is better, actually.  I need my virtual memory for other things
>  > than decorated log files.
> 
> I don't decorate the log files.  I use things like M-x occur or M-x
> delete-non-matching lines on them, though.  Does less support such
> features now?

Since version 424, Less has this:

  * New "&" command allows filtering of lines based on a pattern.

But you need that version installed (it was released less than a year
ago) to take advantage of this, and it doesn't seem to support the
equivalent of delete-matching-lines; instead, you will need to invert
the regexp manually.

In my daytime job, I also need to browse huge log files.  I love Less
and use it for simple browsing and searching (the fact that it doesn't
have Emacs limitations of size is sometimes very important).  But as
soon as I need to do something complex, like compare two large log
files or jump between several places, I always fire up Emacs (if it's
not up already), because it's just too painful with Less, even though
features to do that do exist.  If the file is too large, I just cut
the interesting part with Sed.