mless: Making use of the switch in the "main loop"

[xelxebar]

Browsing mless's source, I notice a "main loop" with an inner case statement. It looks to be switching on the exit code of less, supposedly letting one do convenient things like mark messages read, toggle raw/html modes, etc. from within mless. The exit codes acting as ascii codes is nifty.

This behaviour is completely undocumented in mless(1) and, reading through less(1) I can find no way to produce the necessary exit codes. Am I simply missing something obvious?

[leahneukirchen]

See mlesskey.example. This is not yet documented, indeed.

[xelxebar]

Beautiful, thanks.

Apparently, I did miss something sort of obvious. Should have noticed the LESSKEY setting right above the loop!

Might be nice to document this in mless(1).

[xelxebar]

Also, where did you find out about the ability to give arguments to quit and noaction. The allowable commands aren't really documented all the well in lesskey(1). Directly from the source?

[leahneukirchen]

  An action may be followed by an "extra" string.  When such a command is
  entered while running less, the action is performed, and then the extra
  string is parsed, just as if it were typed in to less.  This feature
  can be used in certain cases to extend the functionality of a command.
  For example, see the "{" and ":t" commands in the example below.  The
  extra string has a special meaning for the "quit" action: when less
  quits, first character of the extra string is used as its exit status.

[xelxebar]

Sigh. I completely missed that in my skimming. Thanks.