Hell yes! Syntax highlighting in less!

This is just awesome!

Install the source-highlight package (should be available for most distros including Cygwin)

If you have lesspipe installed, make sure you do not have a line like this in your .bashrc, .bash_profile, or .profile:

[ -x /usr/bin/lesspipe ] && eval "$(SHELL=/bin/sh lesspipe)"

Be aware that by disabling the lesspipe line above you can no longer read gzipped text files (such as are often found in /usr/share/doc) with less but… you can still easily read them with zless.

Then add these lines (preferably to ~/.bashrc) (this is for Debian):

export LESSOPEN="| /usr/share/source-highlight/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh %s"
export LESS=' -R '

Note the path to src-hilite-lesspipe.sh will be different on different systems. Under Cygwin you would use:

export LESSOPEN="| /usr/bin/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh %s"
export LESS=' -R '

This is such a major thing for me, as I often am working on code in a console and referring to other bits of code in other console windows which I have open with less. But it has always been highly annoying when the code in less does not have syntax highlighting.

Reference/credit: blog.tersmitten.nl: How to enable Syntax highlighting in less