feature request: option to heed formfeed (control-L) as forcing a new page

[lindes]

Hi there. Thank you for your continued work over the decades on less! Neat to see that it seems to be the same original author still actively maintaining it. I've been using less for several of those decades, now, and appreciate having it around. :)

Anyway, I was wondering:

Would it be possible to get less to treat ^L (aka formfeed, \f, ASCII FF, etc.) as a signal of wanting a new page of output?

Your old friend more does "pause" on seeing this character, though that fails to get the nice less behavior of clearing the screen when about to display a page. IMHO, it'd be nice to have this pause option in less as well, where it would behave more or less similarly to how it behaves when displaying the next of multiple specified input files.

I don't imagine it would be desirable to make this the default behavior, because it might surprise a lot of folks, so, the request here is to add a command-line option (-f is taken, but -l seems to be available? And I might propose --form-feed as the long option name, though I'm open to whatever makes sense to you), and when that option is specified, either on the command line or in one's $LESS, then it behaves as I'm suggesting.

Also, I'm thinking that unlike more, it would make sense for less to not print anything related to the ^L when this option is on. Just pause and then, upon spacebar, start a new screen page of display. I'm not entirely sure what would make sense as far as backwards scrolling from there. Maybe control-B would just skip you back to the last screen page of the prior section, and k would actually cause the ^L to display after all, and treat it as though it was an unbroken section of text, at least as long as that ^L is on the screen (after which, hitting space again might get you back to the requested behavior).

Hopefully this request makes sense and might be reasonable to accommodate. I know I'd appreciate having this functionality, and while it's certainly possible it's a rare desire, it seems I'm not the only one to have it: I came across a stackoverflow (well, superuser stackexchange) question asking for the same sort of thing.

Thanks again!

[lindes]

P.S. If you (or anyone) has any pointers on how I might go about this, with a little guidance, I'd probably be up for trying to build a patch. I tried looking through the codebase a little, and I think I could wrap my head around it with time, but I wasn't quite sure where to start, and got a little overwhelmed.