bat - cat on steroids

I sometimes find myself choosing between multiple commands to see the content of a text file:

•  cat - the simplest Unix command to show files. But it does not have pagination, nor syntax highlighting.
•  less - the standard pager (replacing the venerable more). It does have pagination, but not syntax highlighting. And sometimes you don’t need pagination, if the file is short enough.
• vim - replacing the venerable vi. It’s not a pager, but it can be used with -R (read-only) or with the name view which is usually a symbolic link to vim. It has pagination and syntax highlighting, but to me seems like an overkill to use it just to see files.

As a side note, where does the name cat come from? Other Unix commands usually have a suggestive name, even if abbreviated: ls = list, cp = copy, mv = move, etc. Cat comes from ‘conCATenate’ because it can be used to concatenate files, using the shell redirection mechanism:

cat file1 file2 [...] > file-result

All those are fine and dandy and more than 30 years old (or 50?). So, enter bat, a command thought to replace cat, with some improvements:

• Includes all cat functionality
• It has pagination but only if it’s needed. If the file is short, just show it and return the prompt
• It has syntax highlighting. The Kubernetes yaml files look great!
• It has git integrations and it marks modifications!
• When paginate, it uses less so you can use all it’s shortcuts (h for help, / to search, > to jump to the end of the file etc)

How to install it? Well, fortunately there are packages so a simple apt install bat or brew install bat will quickly do it. On Debian, the command is named batcat. 

This is how it looks:

In the end, if you like it, find out more on the official Github page at https://github.com/sharkdp/bat . 

About the Author 

Viorel Anghel has 20+ years of experience as an IT Professional, taking on various roles, such as Systems Architect, Sysadmin, Network Engineer, SRE, DevOps, and Tech Lead. He has a background in Unix/Linux systems administration, high availability, scalability, change, and config management. Also, Viorel is a RedHat Certified Engineer and AWS Certified Solutions Architect, working with Docker, Kubernetes, Xen, AWS, GCP, Cassandra, Kafka, and many other technologies. He is the Head of Cloud and Infrastructure at eSolutions.