Piping through 'less' is problematic

[gsinclair]

I've never seen this before, but it's very reproducible on my shiny new iMac in both Terminal and iTerm. Running whitestone | less -R in a project directory looks OK to start with, but any input you give less (e.g. Space, Down, even q) is not acted upon until you hit Enter. This is not how less is supposed to behave! Clearly the control characters are having an effect.

I'll have to try it again with the latest code (not that I think there have been any changes) on Cygwin.

Interestingly, running whitestone > test.log; less test.log solves the problem. So if less has access to the whole file, there's no issue.

Having looked at the raw Whitestone output, I think there are a lot of ANSI codes. Sure, the colouring in Whitestone is pretty complicated, but I think the codes could be simplified a bit -- that's a job for Col. Also, each line ends with \e[0m, which I think is correct, but git diff, with its coloured output, only uses \e[m -- that is, no zero. Further research warranted.

Summary: I've only seen this happen on the Mac, but other software emits coloured text without causing less any problems, so there is certainly an issue here to be fixed.