Syntax highlighting in less

If you have had to read text based files in Linux environment, you most likely have stumbled upon a tool called less. It’s very powerful tool, but I quite often wish there’d some level of syntax highlighting when viewing e.g. shell scripts or something similar.

Today I decided to research the topic a bit and found out it is indeed possible to use different styles with less. The most feasible option for me was to use external tool called pygmentize. It is a generic syntax highlighter created with Python.

Here’s how I made less to use syntax highlighting offered by pygmentize always when I use less.

1. Install pygmentize by running sudo apt install python3-pygments
2. Select your favorite theme from the built-in themes (you could also download or create your own). For this post I’ll use my favorite: one-dark
3. Add export LESSOPEN="|pygmentize -P style=one-dark -g %s and export LESS="-R" to your shell profile file (e.g. for bash: ~/.bashrc)
4. To use in your current shell session, remember to run source <shell profile file>, for example on bash source ~/.bashrc - instead of this you could also just restart your terminal
5. Open a file with less - it should have syntax highlighting now!

After finding out it is this simple, I wish I had searched for this much earlier since this is a really good improvement 😅

Thanks for reading and enjoy your more colorful less!