This stuff about less(1) is only tangential to groff, but it did come up in the context of viewing man pages, so I'm keeping the groff list in the cc.
On 5/12/21, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > One thing I would mention is that less(1) supports regex searches within > its buffer. On my system, the searches are even case-insensitive by > default if the search pattern is all lowercase, and not otherwise. less's default is for searches to be case-sensitive. Its -i option (which can be given on the command line or while less is running) is what activates the behavior described above. A user or a distro might make -i the default in their environment (I do) through the $LESS environment variable or an alias, but that isn't less's out-of-the-box behavior. > In fact, to leap among sections you can do > > /^[a-z] > > regardless of the lettercase convention, and after doing the above once > you can type simply > > / > > to repeat the search or > > ? > > to repeat it in the backwards direction. Or to save yourself a keypress (since those methods require a "Return" after the "/" or "?") you can use "n" and "N" respectively. Longtime vi users will do this without even thinking about it.
