Maybe I missed it, is there no love for the piping to an external command?
I set a mark, move to somewhere else, then save the area between where I am and the mark: ma(assign mark "a" to position), jjj(move three lines away), |a(pipe from current-position to the "a" mark then a ! prompt appears so enter...) cat >somefile (which dumps the selected text, cur-pos to mark "a", into somefile).
That was great for saving snippets of news or emails.
Also, the -j setting. Sets the line position for searches so context is available, eg using -j8 means the search is 8 lines from the top of the screen.
I use the piping feature of less to add some interactivity to git-log.
When a commit is "selected" (at the top line of the screen), usually after a series of n/N, I can press a shortcut that invokes an action on this commit.
Currently, I use it for two things:
1. Running git-show on a commit I'm interested in. The cool thing is that once I quit the git-show's less, I'm back to where I was in git-log's less. They stack.
2. fixup-ing a commit, after verifying with the command from 1. that it really is the one I want. I've had enough problems with git-absorb and git-fixup that I prefer to do it myself.
I detect when a particular command is running[1] and set up keyboard shortcuts that send key sequences to less and ultimately lead to the top line of the screen being piped to a short script of mine that extracts the commit hash and does something with it.
[1]: via a debug trap in bash, which sets the terminal title, which, in turn, is detected by keyd-application-mapper; other setups are possible, I used to use tmux for that.
I set a mark, move to somewhere else, then save the area between where I am and the mark: ma(assign mark "a" to position), jjj(move three lines away), |a(pipe from current-position to the "a" mark then a ! prompt appears so enter...) cat >somefile (which dumps the selected text, cur-pos to mark "a", into somefile).
That was great for saving snippets of news or emails.
Also, the -j setting. Sets the line position for searches so context is available, eg using -j8 means the search is 8 lines from the top of the screen.