Introduction

page is a minimalist terminal pager written in C with no dependencies.

• Supports UTF-8 (and only UTF-8).
• Handles all ANSI escape codes (e.g. colors) except codes that move the cursor.
• Shows percentage progress when displaying a file.
• Should be portable to most POSIX systems, though it is not strictly POSIX compliant since there wasn't a POSIX compliant way to get the terminal dimensions in C until 2024 which isn't supported everywhere yet.
• page is about 260 lines of code.

Usage

<command> | page
page <file>

Backwards movement only works when paging a file, but you can convert a stream to a file with the fpipe utility which writes the whole stream to a temporary file. This should only be used when the stream is not too large.

<command> | fpipe page

Commands

• ENTER/DOWN/j - scroll down one line
• SPACE - scroll down one screen
• d - scroll down half a screen
• UP/k - sroll up one line (when paging a file)
• b - scroll up one screen (when paging a file)
• u - scroll up half a screen (when paging a file)
• g - go to top of file (when paging a file)
• Ng - go to line number N (going backwards only supported when paging a file)
• G - go to the end
• Np - go to next line after N% of file size (when paging a file)
• q/ESC - quit

Scrolling commands can be prefixed by a number N to make them repeat N times.

Scrolling backwards won't work after a byte-based jump like the p command until a line-based jump command like g is executed.

Building

Run ./make or env CC=musl-gcc ./make.