How less works: the terminal’s alternative buffer

Run less foo.txt. Your terminal clears, replaced with the contents of foo.txt. When you hit q, your previous shell history redisplays! How does less achieve this?

less is not just printing the file contents to stdout. That’s what cat foo.txt would do. Rather, less treats its stdout as a terminal. A terminal has extra features, such as restoring the previous display state. Let’s see how less achieves this.

The standard library for interacting with terminals is ncurses.h. The following C program is a crappy less reimplementation using ncurses:

#include <ncurses.h>
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  initscr();
  FILE* f = fopen(argv[1], "r");
  int c;
  while ((c = getc(f)) != EOF) printw("%c", c);
  fclose(f);
  refresh();
  getc(stdin);
  endwin();
  return 0;
}

To discover the magic behind ncurses.h, we can run our program and pipe its output to another file:

$ clang -lcurses less.c
$ echo 'Hello, world!' > to_display.txt
$ ./a.out to_display.txt > output.txt
$ hexdump -C output.txt
00000000  1b 5b 3f 31 30 34 39 68  1b 5b 31 3b 33 38 72 1b  |.[?1049h.[1;38r.|
00000010  28 42 1b 5b 6d 1b 5b 34  6c 1b 5b 3f 37 68 1b 5b  |(B.[m.[4l.[?7h.[|
00000020  48 1b 5b 32 4a 48 65 6c  6c 6f 2c 20 77 6f 72 6c  |H.[2JHello, worl|
00000030  64 21 0d 0a 1b 5b 33 38  3b 31 48 1b 5b 3f 31 30  |d!...[38;1H.[?10|
00000040  34 39 6c 0d 1b 5b 3f 31  6c 1b 3e                 |49l..[?1l.>|
0000004b

Curses achieves its magic via inline “escape sequences”. Two important escape sequences in here are \e[?1049h and \e[?1049l. These are escape sequences for switching to and from the “alternate screen”. This alternate screen is a feature supported by most terminals, including xterm.

We can therefore make a simpler crappy less reimplementation without using ncurses:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char** argv) {
  puts("\e[?1049h");
  FILE* f = fopen(argv[1], "r");
  int c;
  while ((c = getc(f)) != EOF) putc(c, stdout);
  fclose(f);
  getc(stdin);
  puts("\e[?1049l");
  return 0;
}

Actually, the escape sequences \e[?1049h and \e[?1049l are specific to XTerm. Other terminals might use different escape sequences for the same feature. Ncurses knows about many terminal types, and used XTerm escape sequences because my iTerm is set to report its terminal type as xterm-256color. Ncurses achieves this by using the standard terminfo.h database, which wraps many different terminal types, giving standard names to escape sequences. Terminfo calls these sequences smcup and rmcup. We can access the terminfo database with the command tput, giving us another crappy less reimplementation in shell:

#!/bin/bash
tput smcup
cat "${1}"
read
tput rmcup

This page copyright James Fisher 2017. Content is not associated with my employer. Found an error? Edit this page.

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