You could stop setting LESSOPEN. I long ago decided the "convenience"
of having gzip files etc. automatically unpacked was not worth the
other side-effects.
Bye LESSOPEN
If I need to look at "gzip ... etc" files, I can use an alias:
alias lessopen=$'\n(){\n export LESSOPEN="|lesspipe %s"\n less $*\n}'
Again, thanks,
Jim