This version of less comes with some Gentoo enhancements: - default lesspipe.sh script to "view" files - colorization support To see what file types are supported, just read the /usr/bin/lesspipe.sh script (it's just a plain text bash script). Colorization support is disabled by default. To enable it, export the LESSCOLOR variable to "yes": $ export LESSCOLOR=yes We also provide a colorization script, 'code2color', that is used by default. If you wish to use another script, simply export the LESSCOLORIZER variable to name of the script: $ export LESSCOLORIZER=some-other-script If you want to use the code2color script and the default color schemes are not acceptable, you can develop your own schemes and save them in one of the following places: /etc/code2color ~/.code2color CODE2COLOR_CONFIG env var