Exiting a ‘&pattern’ search in less

Since less 530 (released in December 2017), less --quit-if-one-screen does not switch to the alternate screen if it reads less than one screenful. So you won't have this problem if your version of less is recent enough.

In earlier versions, less has to decide whether to use the alternate screen when it starts. You can't defer that choice to when it terminates.

You could call less, let it use the alternate screen, and cat the content onto the primary screen if less terminates automatically. However I don't know of a way to detect automatic termination.

On the other hand, it isn't that difficult to call cat for short inputs and less for larger inputs, even preserving buffering so that you don't have to wait for the whole input to start seeing stuff in less (the buffer may be slightly larger — you won't see anything until you have at least one screenful of data — but not much more).

#!/bin/sh
n=3  # number of screen lines that should remain visible in addition to the content
lines=
newline='
'
case $LINES in
  ''|*[!0-9]*) exec less;;
esac
while [ $n -lt $LINES ] && IFS= read -r line; do
  lines="$lines$newline$line"
done
if [ $n -eq $LINES ]; then
  { printf %s "$lines"; exec cat; } | exec less
else
  printf %s "$lines"
fi

You might prefer to see the lines on the main screen as they come in, and switch to the alternate screen if the lines would cause scrolling.

#!/bin/sh
n=3  # number of screen lines that should remain visible in addition to the content
beginning=
newline='
'
# If we can't determine the terminal height, execute less directly
[ -n "$LINES" ] || LINES=$(tput lines) 2>/dev/null
case $LINES in
  ''|*[!0-9]*) exec less "$@";;
esac
# Read and display enough lines to fill most of the terminal
while [ $n -lt $LINES ] && IFS= read -r line; do
  beginning="$beginning$newline$line"
  printf '%s\n' -- "$line"
  n=$((n + 1))
done
# If the input is longer, run the pager
if [ $n -eq $LINES ]; then
  { printf %s "$beginning"; exec cat; } | exec less "$@"
fi

The most straightforward solution is to upgrade to less 441 or newer. From the changelog:

less-440 fixes a bug in less-438 and, at the risk of some feature creep, adds one much requested feature. The -A option changes search behavior so that an initial search includes the entire displayed screen and does not skip the first line as is currently done. Non-initial searches (for example, the "n" command) continue to skip the first (target) line to allow searches to proceed past the current screen.

less-441 changes the search behavior so that the new -A option introduced in less-440 is now the default. The -A option now changes the behavior to the old, pre-440, behavior.

The -a and -j option can cause the search to begin further than the topmost screen line, but I don't think they can cause the search to begin at the topmost screen line — that's why the -A option was added (and made the default, apparently it was very popular).