Colored ls & man pages in Panther

[Juan Manuel Palacios]

	Hello everybody. Here I start my new year on this list with two geeky 
questions seeking to improve my terminal experience in Panther. Back in 
my Jaguar days there were a couple of things which I used to enjoy 
immensely, which unfortunately are now gone in Panther :-(

	The first one is related to the reading of man pages. Over time I 
developed a fancy "less" footer, which when used as $PAGER would tell 
me exactly *what* man page I was reading (as in, where in the 
filesystem it was located), how long it was and where inside it I was 
currently located. To achieve this I used the following lines in my 
~/.profile:

# Less propmt:
LESS=--prompt="%f (%pb\%, %lmth line, %L lines)$"
export LESS

# Alias to improve the $PAGER
alias less='/usr/bin/less -wis'

	The only problem is that all this relies on man(1) writing the page to 
the cat tree, which it did back then and even does now. The difference 
is that back in Jaguar the page was written to the corresponding cat 
directory in *plain text*, which less(1) could handle well when called 
as $PAGER. Now, unfortunately, in Panther man(1) *compresses* the pages 
with gzip(1) before writing them to the cat tree, which completely 
destroys my setup. I have looked low and behold but I am still to find 
any leads as to where and how I could modify this behavior, them man(1) 
man page makes no mention about it. Anybody have any clues for me on 
this issue? It's proved extremely annoying so far!

	And last but not least, I've been bugged by the colored ls(1) behavior 
in Panther as well. Again, back in my Jaguar days I enjoyed the 
configuration flexibility of GNU's Fileutils, through which you could 
specify color codings for specific file extensions. Since Panther I've 
learned to love the much improved included ls(1), so I've tried to 
stick to it rather than resorting back to Fileutils. However, with 
Panther's ls(1) I don't seem to be able to specify color codings for 
specific file extensions, or at least the man page does not explain how 
to. Changing colors for directories, executables, FIFOs and others is 
easy, but there's no mention anywhere about how to specify a color for 
a file with, say, a .tgz (compressed archive) extension, or a plain 
text with a .tex (LaTeX) extension. Anyone know how to do this with 
Panther's ls(1)?

	Well, that should be about it. Thank you all in advance for your time 
and help over such trivial matters. Happy New Year!


		Juan