Viewing man pages with scroll wheel support

You need to use the termcap(5) feature. The man page on some Unices says this tool is obsolete and to use terminfo, but it's still available on others (and terminfo is more complicated).

More importantly, less uses termcap.

Setting colors for less

I do the following so that less and man (which uses less) will have color:

$ cat ~/.LESS_TERMCAP 
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$(tput bold; tput setaf 2) # green
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$(tput bold; tput setaf 6) # cyan
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$(tput sgr0)
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(tput bold; tput setaf 3; tput setab 4) # yellow on blue
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$(tput rmso; tput sgr0)
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$(tput smul; tput bold; tput setaf 7) # white
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$(tput rmul; tput sgr0)
export LESS_TERMCAP_mr=$(tput rev)
export LESS_TERMCAP_mh=$(tput dim)
export LESS_TERMCAP_ZN=$(tput ssubm)
export LESS_TERMCAP_ZV=$(tput rsubm)
export LESS_TERMCAP_ZO=$(tput ssupm)
export LESS_TERMCAP_ZW=$(tput rsupm)
export GROFF_NO_SGR=1         # For Konsole and Gnome-terminal

And then in my ~/.bashrc, I do this:

# Get color support for 'less'
export LESS="--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS"

# Use colors for less, man, etc.
[[ -f ~/.LESS_TERMCAP ]] && . ~/.LESS_TERMCAP

NOTE: See Documentation on LESS_TERMCAP_* variables? for how this works.

The final result

The document you're viewing (the man page) has 99 lines. If you scroll to the bottom of the document, the 99th line will be at the bottom of the terminal. The pager (less) reports the line number at the top of the terminal: when you're at the top of the document, you'll see line 1/99; at the bottom, you see line 52/99 because you have a 49-line terminal (showing the last 48 lines, i.e. 52 to 99, plus the less status line).

Less doesn't normally scroll beyond the last line of the document. But if you explicitly tell it to (e.g. with 53g to put the 53rd line at the top of the screen), it adds empty lines (actually, lines with a ~, unless you run less -~).