By default, when less exits, the text it was displaying is cleared and the user's terminal window is returned to the state it was in prior to less being invoked.

I think this is a vital feature of less, and of short-lived interactive CLI utilities in general (programs like fzf, bat, etc. also implement this feature).

Peep's selling point seems to be its focus on not displacing the surrounding terminal context; I think that the functionality I just described would be very complementary to this focus.

As a workaround, I wrote a little wrapper script which basically accomplishes this (requires ncurses):

#!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

function isset_help() {
  local opt
  for opt in "$@"; do
    case "$opt" in
      --)
        echo 0
        return 0
        ;;
      --help)
        echo 1
        return 0
        ;;
    esac
  done

  while getopts ':h' opt "$@"; do
    case "$opt" in
      h)
        echo 1
        return 0
        ;;
      *)
        continue
        ;;
    esac
  done

  echo 0
  return 0
}

function main() {
  local -i h
  h=$(isset_help "$@")
  [[ $h -eq 0 ]] && tput sc
  peep "$@"
  local -i c=$?
  [[ $c -eq 0 && $h -eq 0 ]] && tput rc
  return $c
}

main "$@"

Before:

After:

It's far from ideal and doesn't work when the cursor line is at or within --lines of the bottom of the terminal window, but it should give you an idea of what I am proposing.

Thanks for creating this project, I really love using it!