less in an xterm

[Riku Saikkonen <rjs@lloke.dna.fi>]

Something I've wondered about for a long time (ever since I first installed
Debian 1.1), and thought I'd finally ask...

When I run less in an xterm, it seems to save the image of whatever is in
the window, display whatever it's displaying, and then restore the image. On
the Linux console, when I exit less, I get just the shell prompt on the
bottom of the screen, and not whatever was on the screen when I ran less.

I'm used to and like the console behaviour more. Is there a way to get the
same behaviour in an xterm?

The same happens with anything that runs less, like man. The behaviour in an
xterm is, to me, especially annoying with man pages, since I'm used to doing
a "man command", quitting the pager keeping the top of the man page on the
screen, and then using the Synopsis on the man page to formulate my command
at the shell prompt.

This seems to be somewhat of a `Debian feature', since I haven't seen it on
Slackware systems. I think it has to do with the terminfo entry for xterm
(Slackware's less uses termcap, AFAIK), but I'm not sure.

--
-=- Rjs -=- rjs@spider.compart.fi, rjs@lloke.dna.fi