How does IPython decide to open the Markdown in less? Is it configurable? Maybe you can set the PAGER variable to bat and IPython would honor it? Probably you'd then also want to set the BAT_PAGER variable to less so you still get paged output.

Yes, this should be possible, because IPython sends long ? / ?? output through a pager and honors the PAGER environment variable. The easiest setup is to point PAGER at bat, then let bat use less as its own pager.

For example:

export PAGER='bat --language=md --style=plain'
export BAT_PAGER='less'

Then restart IPython and try:

?np.array

A few caveats:

• bat will syntax-highlight Markdown-ish docstrings, but it does not fully render Markdown the way a rich terminal UI would. So this improves readability, but it will still be terminal text.
• If your shell does not like spaces in PAGER, put the bat command in a tiny wrapper script and export PAGER to that script instead.
• If you want to verify that IPython is really honoring PAGER, set it to plain less first, confirm that works, then switch it to bat ... + BAT_PAGER=less.

So the short version is: yes, this is a pager configuration problem more than an IPython problem, and PAGER=bat ... + BAT_PAGER=less is the combination I would try first.