index

moar or moor

Modern pager

moar1 is command line replacement for the venerable tools less and more. These tools are known as pagers - they take a stream of text input and show it one page at a time, allowing you to read, scroll up and down, or even search through the text.

Suprising warning

This morning, after running brew update, I settled in to explore the dark corners of some old infrastructure code. I frequently use rg $STRING | moar to find relationships across files.

But this time, a warning flashed: moar would soon be renamed to moor.

Naming confusion

The name was already great, right? moar is clever and funny. Digging into why this familiar utility was changing, it turns out that Debian already has a package with a binary named moar. Debian and derivative linux distros like Ubuntu do not allow packages to publish a binary with the same name. So, in order to get moar into the apt package repositories, it would be simpler to rename the tool completely.2

Don’t forget

export PAGER=$(which moor)

Footnotes

  1. moor on GitHub: https://github.com/walles/moor really long ↩

  2. Pull request to change the name: https://github.com/walles/moor/pull/305 ↩