Use `minus` as a paging library

[AMythicDev]

I don't know what bat currently uses for paging (looks like less maybe) but it proposes two main problems. First is cross-compatiblity, bat cannot be packaged for Windows and requires less (which requires Mingw) to be installed. Second is less is binary and it's use as a library is not very perfect solution. These are the main problem minus solved. It's a pure rust library for paging output in a terminal. It provides great customisation of output which also being very compact

I wanted to know whether the bat team could implement this pager inside bat

Disclosure: I am the author of minus

[sharkdp]

Thank you for posting here! I already had a closer look at minus before and I was already considering to use it as a solution to #1053. It looks great.

Maybe it would make sense to move the discussion to that ticket?

In particular, I would be interested if it could solve all/some of the listed bullet points.

You mentioned cross-compatibility. Does minus support non-ASCII terminals?

[AMythicDev]

I don't think minus implments much of the things in the checklist. In my opinion there are some things there that's not part of a usual pager. Anyway if you want you could always fork and do some edits or if you're fine with what's already there then it could be implemented

[AMythicDev]

I had gone through a very quick and dirty implementation of minus within bat and it works perfectly. Although if you want to get the features of that checklist I think you probably need to fork minus

[AMythicDev]

Hii @sharkdp! It has been a long time here. All this time, minus has grown a lot. It now has:-

• Proper line wrapping
• Native API for applications to define key/mouse actions
• Better line numbering
• Much improved search
• Lots of optimization done when writing to the terminal

and much more...

Things like incremental searching and more are also on their way.

So I just wanted to ask whether can reconsider minus to be included inside bat.