GUI – Is There a Graphical Pager?

guipager

Does someone know of a GUI application (X/GTK+/Qt/whatever) that can be used instead of less or more for viewing text, specifically one piped in from standard input? Ideally looking for something that can also run on Mac OSX (or maybe even just on Mac).

I'm looking to introduce UNIX newbies to the wonderful world of command line text processing (with awk, sed, grep and even some perl) and it would be useful to show them the text using a nice GUI that allows interactive search, scrolling with the mouse (I know most Linux terminals support mouse scrolling with less, but Mac terminals do not), etc.

The best thing I found so far was to pipe input into zenity --text-info, but that viewer is very limited and does not even allow searching.

Best Answer

Kate

You can pipe into kate, using command | kate -i.

From $ man kate:

   -i, --stdin
       Read the contents of stdin

Kwrite

You can pipe into kwrite with command | kwrite -i.

From $ kwrite --help:

-i, --stdin                Read the contents of stdin.

Gvim

Somewhat facetiously, you can also pipe into gvim with command | gvim -.

Related Question