Thanks, these are good suggestions, although not quite the ideal to me.
Just increasing max_rows is definitely one way. I guess it's really not much different than paging via "| pipe" in bash. Mainly I prefer a pure command line interface without taking my hands off the keyboard. Also, it quickly fills up the keyboard buffer.
The other suggestions are good too, just not as good as being able to do a less-style pager to me. I actually end up doing more of the initial data exploration in Stata because one thing it's interface does better (maybe the only thing though) is to allow me to page through rows less-style (it's sort of a very barebones version of less where the "b" and "/" keys don't work, but still closer to what I want than ipython/jupyter qtconsole).