I was using less the other day to look at a log file. The log file was
filled with ANSI color escape sequences which made it pretty painful to
read. I was stuck looking at a white, unparsed log file instead of a
colorful, stylish one.
The -R flag fixes this. It tells less to display the ANSI color escape
sequences as colors rather than the caret notation.
The tradeoff is that less has less control over the overall display of
the screen. This may result in some buggy display behavior, but not
necessarily.