Paging command output as if it was written to a terminal

[ahupp]

Paging command output as if it was written to a terminal

[krobelus]

fish is not currently a terminal but your terminal might support it (for example via OSC 133 https://codeberg.org/dnkl/foot/#piping-last-command-s-output or tmux)

[mqudsi]

socat can do this for you, without any support from the terminal or the shell.

socat - EXEC:'ls --color=auto',pty,setsid,ctty | less -

You'll see that though we are using auto color mode and piping into less, we still get color output (and should be piping into less -R instead).

For apps like rg that use auto color mode as the default, they'll "just work" as you ask, without needing to hunt for any app-specific cli options:

socat - EXEC:'rg . -l',pty,setsid,ctty | less -R

You can use a function to turn page rg -l . into socat - EXEC:'rg . -l',pty,setsid,ctty | less -R. Maybe you could even do it with the new abbr machinery, I'm not sure.