On 5/16/21, G. Branden Robinson <g.branden.robin...@gmail.com> wrote: > At 2021-05-16T20:29:30-0500, Dave Kemper wrote: >> less's default is for searches to be case-sensitive. Its -i option >> (which can be given on the command line or while less is running) is >> what activates the behavior described above. A user or a distro might >> make -i the default in their environment (I do) through the $LESS >> environment variable or an alias, but that isn't less's out-of-the-box >> behavior. > > On my Debian buster-based system, less(1) behaves that way, but $LESS is > not defined in my environment and I don't have a shell alias or function > set up. Checking the source package, I don't see patches to turn -i on > by default. Baffling!
Maybe less's build system has a switch to compile in a different default? Maybe this is a recent change? Maybe I'm completely wrong? I haven't looked at the source or built it myself from github; I'm going by the behavior on my systems, behavior I've observed on other systems, and the wording of the man page (which documents "-i" to invoke case-mostly-insensitive searches rather than an option to switch to case-sensitive ones).
