Man (and less) colors...

I had the following set in my environment.

export LESS='-QRS'
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so="$(printf 'rev\nbold\nsetaf 3\n' | tput -S)"
export LESS_TERMCAP_se="$(tput sgr0)"
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'

Made for nice colored man pages. Unfortunately, when I used the "env" command, environment variables following the LESS_TERMCAP_* variables got mucked up: underlined, etc.

So I unset them and now use this alias:

alias man="LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[48;5;3
m\E[38;5;0m' LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' man"

alias less="LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m' LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;38;5;74m' LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[48;5;3
m\E[38;5;0m' LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m' LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[04;38;5;146m' less"

Not sure it's the best solution, but it seemed better than the lesskey stuff. Also found the prompt option and added that:

export LESS='-QRS --prompt="%f (%pb\%, %lmth line, %L lines)$ '

The final fairly useful thing from poking in the code is the LESS_TERMCAP_DEBUG environment variable. It highlights the section names which is pretty darn useful for figuring the colors out. Example:

mikesart@mikesart-petra:~/dev$ LESS_TERMCAP_DEBUG=1 man strstr

<ti><ks><cr>STRSTR(3) Linux Programmer's Manual

<md>NAME<me>

       strstr, strcasestr - locate a substring

<md>SYNOPSIS<me>

       <md>#include<me> <md><string.h><me>

... strstr(3) line 1/43 (END) (press h for help or q to quit)<se><ce>