When I first started using Unix, I used a program called “more” to read files. The name makes sense because each time you press the space bar, more will show you more of your file, one screen at a time.
Now everyone uses less, and more is all but forgotten.
Daniel Halbert wrote more in 1978. Mark Nudelman a similar program with more functionality in 1984 which he named less. The name was a pun on the aphorism “less is more” [1]. Soon less completely replaced more.
I’m curious why I ever used more, since less had taken over before I touched Unix. One possibility is that someone who was accustomed to more showed me that command. Another possibility is that I learned it from reading The Unix Programming Environment which came out in November 1983. It includes more but not less.
My laptop contains executables for more and less in /usr/bin. The command
diff less more
returns nothing, indicating that the binaries are identical: less literally is more.
My desktop has distinct binaries for less and more. The more binary is much smaller, and so I assume it is limited to the original functionality of more, more or less.
Related posts
- Less isn’t more. Just enough is more.
- More data, less accuracy
- More theoretical power, less real power
[1] I don’t know who coined the phrase “less is more,” but it is associated with architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) who often quoted it. He did not apply the principle to is own name, however. He was born Ludwig Mies and later appended van der Rohe.
There is also a successor of “more” called “most”. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_pager
I think I knew about “more” because it was mentioned in Linux tutorials. “less” was not always installed by default.
less’s motto is “less is more or less more”.
“Less is More” is a phrase used in a Robert Browning poem “Andrea del Sarto” (“The Faultless Painter”) published in his 1855 collection, so predates Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969).
POEM: https://www.poetrycat.com/robert-browning/andrea-del-sarto—called-the-faultless-painter
The Oxford English Dictionary credits Robert Browning’s poem “Andrea del Sarto” from 1855 as the first recorded use of “less is more”. The phrase is used in a dialogic sense, so perhaps it was in common use by the mid 1850s.
Just FYI if you are using more on MacOS you are literally using less. If you type ‘more –version’ into the terminal you get:
> more –version
less 581.2 (POSIX regular expressions)
Copyright (C) 1984-2021 Mark Nudelman
It’s curious that there is a separate binary called “more” that is a duplicate of the “less” binary. I wonder why they didn’t just make “more” an alias to “less.”
‘less’ does have some nice capabilities. For example, on ubuntu if I do less on a pdf file, it shows me the text contents of the pdf. Doing ‘more’ on pdf just displays the raw pdf.
I had no idea
lesscould read a PDF.That violates the Unix philosophy that a tool should do only one thing, but it could be very handy. :)