Info Catalog gettext: Style rules gettext: Colorizing

gettext: Customizing less

 
 9.11.5 Customizing ‘less’ for viewing PO files
 ----------------------------------------------
 
    The ‘less’ program is a popular text file browser for use in a text
 screen or terminal emulator.  It also supports text with embedded escape
 sequences for colors and text decorations.
 
    You can use ‘less’ to view a PO file like this (assuming an UTF-8
 environment):
 
      msgcat --to-code=UTF-8 --color xyz.po | less -R
 
    You can simplify this to this simple command:
 
      less xyz.po
 
 after these three preparations:
 
   1. Add the options ‘-R’ and ‘-f’ to the ‘LESS’ environment variable.
      In sh shells:
           $ LESS="$LESS -R -f"
           $ export LESS
 
   2. If your system does not already have the ‘lessopen.sh’ and
      ‘lessclose.sh’ scripts, create them and set the ‘LESSOPEN’ and
      ‘LESSCLOSE’ environment variables, as indicated in the manual page
      (‘man less’).
 
   3. Add to ‘lessopen.sh’ a piece of script that recognizes PO files
      through their file extension and invokes ‘msgcat’ on them,
      producing a temporary file.  Like this:
 
           case "$1" in
             *.po)
               tmpfile=`mktemp "${TMPDIR-/tmp}/less.XXXXXX"`
               msgcat --to-code=UTF-8 --color "$1" > "$tmpfile"
               echo "$tmpfile"
               exit 0
               ;;
           esac
 

Info Catalog gettext: Style rules gettext: Colorizing