Is there any way to exit “less” without clearing the screen?

Question

Relatively often, I find myself wanting to quit less but leave what I was viewing on the screen, to refer back to. Is there any way to do this? Workarounds?

(My current workaround is to quit, then use more. So any workaround that's better than that is welcomed. The ideal would be something I can use once I'm already inside less, perhaps with a shell setting or some scripting.)

EDIT My desktop is OSX, but I use RHEL and Ubuntu servers.

ANSWER

Consolidating uther's answer below and some further research:

Add this to your ~/.bashrc:

export LESS="-r -X"

Answer 1

This is actually a function of the terminal emulator you are using (xterm, gnome-terminal, konsole, screen). An alternate screen, or altscreen, gets launched when programs such as less or vim are invoked. This altscreen has no history buffer and exits immediately when you quit the program, switching back to the original screen which restores the previous window content history and placement.

You can prevent less from launch in an altscreen by passing the argument "-X".

less -X /path/to/some/file

You can also pass "-X" as an environment variable. So if you are using bash, place this in ~/.bashrc:

export LESS="-X"

However, this disbles the termcap (terminal capability) initialization and deinitialization, so other views when you use less may appear off.

Another option would be to use screen and set the option altscreen off in your ~/.screenrc. less will not clear the screen and should preserve color formatting. Presumably tmux will have the same option.

This blog entry describes the problem and offers some different solutions specific to gnome-terminal with varying success.