Search man pages with less: Unhighlight search results

The man command uses a pager, that is responsible for pagination, but also search and highlight.
If your pager is less, you can search man pages with /search string.
It will then highlight the search results, and they can be traversed with n/N.
The highlighting helps to find the search string, but it can then be disturbing or even unreadable, and here's how to remove it (Source):

You can use Alt+u to remove the highlight on last search results.
You can highlight them again with Alt+u, it's a toggle.

Switching off the highlight does not switch off the status column, showing marks on each line containing a match, if the column is enabled using options -J or --status-column or keys -J.

To hide the status column, use -+J.

To show the status column, use -J.

(Technically, Alt+u is equivalent to ESC+u on terminal level - that is why the Alt-key is not mentioned in the man page.)

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Configure less highlight mode

less is configured via environment variables.
One of them starts the highlight mode.
Instead of insane coloring, you can set it to simple reverse video:
LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(printf "\e[7m")

On my system,. there's a man function in /etc/bash.bashrc which I have modified as follows:

sh
man() {
env LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$(printf "\e[1;31m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_md=$(printf "\e[1;31m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_me=$(printf "\e[0m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_se=$(printf "\e[0m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(printf "\e[7m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$(printf "\e[0m") \
LESS_TERMCAP_us=$(printf "\e[1;32m") \
man "$@"
}
#LESS_TERMCAP_so=$(printf "\e[1;44;33m")
# that used to be in the man function for less's annoyingly over-colorful status line.
# changed it to simple reverse video (tput rev)