Bat: Cat with syntax highlighting (github.com)

and rsync works fine for people too, I guess that's why nobody uses Dropbox

I call cat when I need to pipe or copy something, and just bat if I wanna read it myself. I find this as a good compromise, I like how bat formats things.

Your solution would be ok with an alias as well, so thanks. Might try it just so I dont need yet another program lying around

But it's not in rust.

I don't seem to have "highlight" on my system.

That has git integration, like bat does? That shows non-printable characters like bat does? That allows you to concatenate and page multiple files at once like bat does? That supports the --line-range option like bat does? You can pipe the output of tail -f through your alias?

I guess if all you did was read the headline of the post you could assume your alias does all the same things as bat.

You don't need cat:

  highlight --force -O xterm256 < whatever | less -SRNI

i tried that:

    cat .bashrc  | highlight --force -O xterm256 | less -SRNI

everything is green, except line numbers are black (which comes from less), but

    bat .bashrc

shows actual syntax highlighting.

so apparently, no, it doesn't work.

to be fair, this is how it works:

   cat .bashrc | highlight --syntax shellscript -O ansi | less -R

to avoid getting caught by the useless use of cat police, this does too:

   highlight --syntax shellscript -O ansi .bashrc | less -R

however, i have to tell it which syntax to use

but to its credit, highlight even has support for pike, which bat doesn't (yet) (fixed that for myself, at least)

so overall, bat wins.

Although I agree with other commenters that your command can't compare to all of bat's features, many of which I appreciate... thank you for sharing this tip, I didn't know about `highlight` and I can't install `bat` at work.

This will live in my .bashrc for a long time:

    cat() {
      if [[ -t 1 ]]; then
        command cat "$@" | highlight --force -O xterm256
      else
        # plain cat to pipe into other things
        command cat "$@"
      fi
    }

    command highlight --stdout --force -O xterm256 "$@"

Is there a list somewhere of these nice, modern drop-in replacements for standard bash tools?

> Uses the pager for large files automatically etc. Very nice.

If you like that, you can also make less behave like cat if the file fits in one screen. You just need to add F to the LESS environment variable. It's very convenient because so many things depend on less.

https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/less.1.html#:~:tex...