I'm just wondering: why does less store its configuration in a binary file .less, which you have to generate with lesskey from the text-file .lesskey?What could be the benefits of this behavior? Speed? But parsing a tiny human-readable configuration file can't take that long.
Why does less store its configuration in a binary file?
configuration;less
The source code for lesskey says: * Copyright (C) 1984-2015  Mark Nudelmanwhich gives a hint that performance might have been a factor in deciding to use a compiled configuration file.  Machines were a little smaller and slower 32 years ago.