Bat

A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

• Syntax highlighting: bat supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup languages.
• Git integration: bat communicates with git to show modifications with respect to the index (see left side bar).
• Show non-printable characters: You can use the -A/--show-all option to show and highlight non-printable characters.

Automatic paging

By default, bat pipes its own output to a pager (e.g., less) if the output is too large for one screen. If you would rather bat work like cat all the time (never page output), you can set --paging=never as an option, either on the command line or in your configuration file. If you intend to alias cat to bat in your shell configuration, you can use alias cat='bat --paging=never' to preserve the default behavior.

File concatenation

Even with a pager set, you can still use bat to concatenate files. Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e., when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents, regardless of the --pager option's value.