How to make less -S not take up the entire screen

Compatible: ^G. Easy to type: =. Less copied several key bindings from vi, including this one. This displays the file name (the path that you passed on the less command line) and the position in the file.

You can have this information permanently by calling less with the -M option. Include -M in the LESS environment variable. You can set this variable in your ~/.profile, ~/.pam_environment or wherever you define environment variables. Alternatively, you can set LESS by using lesskey to produce the configuration file ~/.less which is read by less.

man uses your default pager, which on Ubuntu (and most other systems) is less. You can change this, but you would likely know you did. That's why the interface in which you page through man's formatted output looks and feels like less: it is. After man formats the manpage, it uses less to display it. So what you probably want is to make less always behave as though the -Q option had been passed to it, including when it is used by man and other programs.

When less runs, it examines the LESS environment variable for options to use in addition to those passed to it in command-line arguments. So you can put this in one of the scripts that gets sourced when you open a WSL command prompt:

export LESS=-Q

Or you might prefer this, which preserves any options already present in the LESS variable. Usually this is unnecessary because that variable is not usually defined already anyway, but this still works even if it isn't:

export LESS="$LESS -Q"

Most Ubuntu users will want to set this and and other environment variables in their ~/.profile file. (There is also a way with ~/.pam_environment that some people prefer, which uses a different syntax.) This is what I would recommend for you, too, if the shell WSL gives you is a login shell, which on recent builds (or if you have configured it to be) it should be.

You can check this by running shopt login_shell in the shell provided when you open a WSL command prompt window. If it's not a login shell and you don't want to add -l or --login to the Windows shortcut, then put one of those export commands in .bashrc instead of .profile.