prevent less linewrapp from breaking words — split on white space only

Question

I want less's linewrapping to be smarter... when lessing through text it's wrapping lines in such a way that words get broken up which makes reading difficult. The smart way would mean only breaking lines on a "space" character.

Is this possible?

In reading the man page and browsing the internet I surprised to see no other mention or inquiry of this.

If less can't do this is there another pager that can?

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edits:

• Ideally this would effect could be toggled with a flag like --cleanwrap.
• Using this on stdin like some-report.py | less -i --cleanwrap is important.
• Ideally the pager will adjust to screen/terminal(tmux pane) resizing... maybe less isn't the right tool? This could be sacrificed if the above features were possible :(

Answer 1

less doesn’t have a built-in way of doing this, but if you use lesspipe, you can extend that to wrap files by extension.

The following, saved as ~/.lessfilter, will word-wrap .txt files at 80 columns:

#!/bin/sh

case "$1" in
    *.txt) fold -s "$1";;
    *)     exit 1;;
esac

exit 0

Make this executable, then make sure less is using lesspipe:

eval "$(lesspipe)"

and you should find that less ...txt will word-wrap.

This can be extended to handled other extensions, adjust the width to the terminal width, etc.