On: Modernizing “less”

[jingo]

"... I got fed up with the extremely long time it takes less to precalculate line counts on large files..."

When you were experiencing long wait times, did you turn off line numbering?

  less -n logfile

[nhaehnle → jingo]

Sure, but that's not an option if you actually want the line numbers. Given that it was possible to speed up the line number calculation by more than an order of magnitude, I do believe that fixing the code was the right way to go :)

[sounds → jingo]

You can also turn off line numbering _during_ the long "calculating line numbers" phase. Hit Ctrl-C and it says "line numbering off" or somesuch.