
                 WHY USE COMMODORE'S MORE INSTEAD OF LESS?

Nowadays, most self respecting Amigoids read text files with Less, ported to
Amiga from U--x by Bob Leivian.  But the simpler More that comes on the
Workbench disk has several advantages:

1)      It's less than half the size (Less is over 28K!)

2)      It's "pure" and can be made resident, for instantaneous startup

3)      It correctly displays eight bit extended ASCII characters instead of
        translating them into "equivalent" seven bit characters

4)      It correctly responds to Amiga/ANSI escape sequences for underline,
        italic, boldface, and alternate color text, like a regular CON:
	window, instead of showing something like ^[[4m for each one

5)      It has an easy case insensitive search, instead of "regular
        expression" search that you can't use without U*@%#&!x documentation

6)      It's much faster, because it doesn't scroll

7)	I've never seen a bug, and I think I've seen two in Less

8)      You can freely change the window specification with my Fenestrate
        hack (explained below) to make it use e.g. a borderless window on
        the currently topmost screen.  If you try this with Less, it might
        not run if Workbench is interlaced because it alters it's own window
        spec by putting a "4" where it thinks a "2" is.  Thus More is more
	usable with CLImax than Less is.

The disadvantages that More has are:

1)      Fewer features and commands.  But how many of those do you really
        want?  The only one I miss is reverse search.
        
2)      When used from CLI, it writes in CLI's own window instead of using
        its own, thus erasing what was there.  This drawback is solved by
	my V hack.  (But if your CLI is CLImax, you must also use
	Fenestrate, and have ConMan 1.3 (on fish 165) or newer.)

THE TWO HACKS:  V is a small (under 1300 bytes) "pure" CLI program which
acts as a front end for More.  When you run V, it looks for More on the
resident list.  If it's not there, it tries to load SYS:Utilities/More, or
C:More if that fails.  It runs More as a Workbench process and passes the
filename in the command line argument to it in the startup message.  The
effect of this is to make it create a new window when run from CLI, just as
Less does.  Make both V and More resident, you've got a pretty good separate
window text reader essentially built into your CLI (if you use the Shell-
Seg).  The filename after V need not be quoted if it contains spaces, unless
there's a space at one end.

The other hack is Fenestrate.  What it does is surgically alter the CON:
window specification inside More to your specifications.  You could do the
same thing with DiskX or Zap, but this is more foolproof.  (Though of course
it's rare for fools to own Amigas.)  See Fenestrate.readme.

With these two hacks, you don't have to settle for Less.

V and Fenestrate are by Paul Kienitz, in the public domain.   ()

