Why don't Page U/Down, Home/End work in less on Solaris over ssh from Ubuntu?

Question

I need to work on a Solaris server over ssh from my Ubuntu (Lucid) laptop. I got Home/End Insert/Delete Page Up/Down working in csh and bash using bindkey and ~/.inputrc, respectively. But I can't figure out how to get them working in less. How can I figure out what the problem is, and fix it?

Solution

I found the answer here, in section 4.4. less (1).

to use it with the movement keys, have this plain ASCII file .lesskey in your home directory:

^[[A   back-line
^[[B   forw-line
^[[C   right-scroll
^[[D   left-scroll
^[OA   back-line
^[OB   forw-line
^[OC   right-scroll
^[OD   left-scroll
^[[6~  forw-scroll
^[[5~  back-scroll
^[[1~  goto-line
^[[4~  goto-end
^[[7~  goto-line
^[[8~  goto-end

then run the command lesskey. (These are escape sequences for vt100-like terminals.) This creates a binary file .less containing the key bindings.

Comments

[Ryan C. Thompson]

By the way, the rest of that document that I linked to describes how to set up the special keys in all the other programs, including shells. It's excellent stuff.