Thanks Scott. It set me off of to research this more thoroughly and I found this simple elegant solution. You don't have to install anything extra as it is already by default on most machines. As `vim` is installed by default on most machines, it includes a macro to run `vim` like `less`
Some of the options are to create an alias:
`alias vless='vim -u /usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.vim'`
or create a symbolic link:
`ln -s /usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.sh ~/bin/vless`
To install on uBuntu use the follwing:
sudo apt install cmatrix