sharkdp/bat

A cat(1) clone with wings.

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

Key Features • How To Use • Installation • Customization • Project goals, alternatives
[English] [中文] [日本語] [한국어] [Русский]

Sponsors

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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.

How to use

Display a single file on the terminal

> bat README.md

Display multiple files at once

> bat src/*.rs

Read from stdin, determine the syntax automatically (note, highlighting will only work if the syntax can be determined from the first line of the file, usually through a shebang such as #!/bin/sh)

> curl -s https://sh.rustup.rs | bat

Read from stdin, specify the language explicitly

> yaml2json .travis.yml | json_pp | bat -l json

Show and highlight non-printable characters:

> bat -A /etc/hosts

Use it as a cat replacement:

bat > note.md  # quickly create a new file

bat header.md content.md footer.md > document.md

bat -n main.rs  # show line numbers (only)

bat f - g  # output 'f', then stdin, then 'g'.

Integration with other tools

fzf

You can use bat as a previewer for fzf. To do this, use bats --color=always option to force colorized output. You can also use --line-range option to restrict the load times for long files:

fzf --preview "bat --color=always --style=numbers --line-range=:500 {}"

For more information, see fzf's README.

find or fd

You can use the -exec option of find to preview all search results with bat:

find … -exec bat {} +

If you happen to use fd, you can use the -X/--exec-batch option to do the same:

fd … -X bat

ripgrep

With batgrep, bat can be used as the printer for ripgrep search results.

batgrep needle src/

tail -f

bat can be combined with tail -f to continuously monitor a given file with syntax highlighting.

tail -f /var/log/pacman.log | bat --paging=never -l log

Note that we have to switch off paging in order for this to work. We have also specified the syntax explicitly (-l log), as it can not be auto-detected in this case.

git

You can combine bat with git show to view an older version of a given file with proper syntax highlighting:

git show v0.6.0:src/main.rs | bat -l rs

git diff

You can combine bat with git diff to view lines around code changes with proper syntax highlighting:

batdiff() {
    git diff --name-only --relative --diff-filter=d | xargs bat --diff
}

If you prefer to use this as a separate tool, check out batdiff in bat-extras.

If you are looking for more support for git and diff operations, check out delta.

xclip

The line numbers and Git modification markers in the output of bat can make it hard to copy the contents of a file. To prevent this, you can call bat with the -p/--plain option or simply pipe the output into xclip:

bat main.cpp | xclip

bat will detect that the output is being redirected and print the plain file contents.

man

bat can be used as a colorizing pager for man, by setting the MANPAGER environment variable:

export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"
man 2 select

(replace bat with batcat if you are on Debian or Ubuntu)

It might also be necessary to set MANROFFOPT="-c" if you experience formatting problems.

If you prefer to have this bundled in a new command, you can also use batman.

Note that the Manpage syntax is developed in this repository and still needs some work.

Also, note that this will not work with Mandocs man implementation.

prettier / shfmt / rustfmt

The prettybat script is a wrapper that will format code and print it with bat.

Highlighting --help messages

You can use bat to colorize help text: $ cp --help | bat -plhelp

You can also use a wrapper around this:

# in your .bashrc/.zshrc/*rc
alias bathelp='bat --plain --language=help'
help() {
    "$@" --help 2>&1 | bathelp
}

Then you can do $ help cp or $ help git commit.

When you are using zsh, you can also use global aliases to override -h and --help entirely:

alias -g -- -h='-h 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'
alias -g -- --help='--help 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'

This way, you can keep on using cp --help, but get colorized help pages.

Be aware that in some cases, -h may not be a shorthand of --help (for example with ls).

Please report any issues with the help syntax in this repository.

Installation

On Ubuntu (using apt)

... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.

bat is available on Ubuntu since 20.04 ("Focal") and Debian since August 2021 (Debian 11 - "Bullseye").

If your Ubuntu/Debian installation is new enough you can simply run:

sudo apt install bat

Important: If you install bat this way, please note that the executable may be installed as batcat instead of bat (due to a name clash with another package). You can set up a bat -> batcat symlink or alias to prevent any issues that may come up because of this and to be consistent with other distributions:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat

On Ubuntu (using most recent .deb packages)

... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.

If the package has not yet been promoted to your Ubuntu/Debian installation, or you want the most recent release of bat, download the latest .deb package from the release page and install it via:

sudo dpkg -i bat_0.18.3_amd64.deb  # adapt version number and architecture

On Alpine Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources, provided you have the appropriate repository enabled:

apk add bat

On Arch Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources:

pacman -S bat

On Fedora

You can install the bat package from the official Fedora Modular repository.

dnf install bat

On Funtoo Linux

You can install the bat package from dev-kit.

emerge sys-apps/bat

On Gentoo Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources:

emerge sys-apps/bat

On Void Linux

You can install bat via xbps-install:

xbps-install -S bat

On Termux

You can install bat via pkg:

pkg install bat

On FreeBSD

You can install a precompiled bat package with pkg:

pkg install bat

or build it on your own from the FreeBSD ports:

cd /usr/ports/textproc/bat
make install

On OpenBSD

You can install bat package using pkg_add(1):

pkg_add bat

Via nix

You can install bat using the nix package manager:

nix-env -i bat

On openSUSE

You can install bat with zypper:

zypper install bat

Via snap package

There is currently no recommended snap package available. Existing packages may be available, but are not officially supported and may contain issues.

On macOS (or Linux) via Homebrew

You can install bat with Homebrew:

brew install bat

On macOS via MacPorts

Or install bat with MacPorts:

port install bat

On Windows

There are a few options to install bat on Windows. Once you have installed bat, take a look at the "Using bat on Windows" section.

Prerequisites

You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.

With WinGet

You can install bat via WinGet:

winget install sharkdp.bat

With Chocolatey

You can install bat via Chocolatey:

choco install bat

With Scoop

You can install bat via scoop:

scoop install bat

From prebuilt binaries:

You can download prebuilt binaries from the Release page,

You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.

From binaries

Check out the Release page for prebuilt versions of bat for many different architectures. Statically-linked binaries are also available: look for archives with musl in the file name.

From source

If you want to build bat from source, you need Rust 1.70.0 or higher. You can then use cargo to build everything:

cargo install --locked bat

Note that additional files like the man page or shell completion files can not be installed in this way. They will be generated by cargo and should be available in the cargo target folder (under build).

Customization

Highlighting theme

Use bat --list-themes to get a list of all available themes for syntax highlighting. To select the TwoDark theme, call bat with the --theme=TwoDark option or set the BAT_THEME environment variable to TwoDark. Use export BAT_THEME="TwoDark" in your shell's startup file to make the change permanent. Alternatively, use bats configuration file.

If you want to preview the different themes on a custom file, you can use the following command (you need fzf for this):

bat --list-themes | fzf --preview="bat --theme={} --color=always /path/to/file"

bat looks good on a dark background by default. However, if your terminal uses a light background, some themes like GitHub or OneHalfLight will work better for you. You can also use a custom theme by following the 'Adding new themes' section below.

8-bit themes

bat has three themes that always use 8-bit colors, even when truecolor support is available:

• ansi looks decent on any terminal. It uses 3-bit colors: black, red, green, yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white.
• base16 is designed for base16 terminal themes. It uses 4-bit colors (3-bit colors plus bright variants) in accordance with the base16 styling guidelines.
• base16-256 is designed for base16-shell. It replaces certain bright colors with 8-bit colors from 16 to 21. Do not use this simply because you have a 256-color terminal but are not using base16-shell.

Although these themes are more restricted, they have three advantages over truecolor themes. They:

• Enjoy maximum compatibility. Some terminal utilities do not support more than 3-bit colors.
• Adapt to terminal theme changes. Even for already printed output.
• Visually harmonize better with other terminal software.

Output style

You can use the --style option to control the appearance of bats output. You can use --style=numbers,changes, for example, to show only Git changes and line numbers but no grid and no file header. Set the BAT_STYLE environment variable to make these changes permanent or use bats configuration file.

Adding new syntaxes / language definitions

Should you find that a particular syntax is not available within bat, you can follow these instructions to easily add new syntaxes to your current bat installation.

bat uses the excellent syntect library for syntax highlighting. syntect can read any Sublime Text .sublime-syntax file and theme.

A good resource for finding Sublime Syntax packages is Package Control. Once you found a syntax:

1. Create a folder with syntax definition files:

   mkdir -p "$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes"
   cd "$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes"
   
   # Put new '.sublime-syntax' language definition files
   # in this folder (or its subdirectories), for example:
   git clone https://github.com/tellnobody1/sublime-purescript-syntax

2. Now use the following command to parse these files into a binary cache:

   bat cache --build

3. Finally, use bat --list-languages to check if the new languages are available.

   If you ever want to go back to the default settings, call:

   bat cache --clear

4. If you think that a specific syntax should be included in bat by default, please consider opening a "syntax request" ticket after reading the policies and instructions here: Open Syntax Request.

Adding new themes

This works very similar to how we add new syntax definitions.

First, create a folder with the new syntax highlighting themes:

mkdir -p "$(bat --config-dir)/themes"
cd "$(bat --config-dir)/themes"

# Download a theme in '.tmTheme' format, for example:
git clone https://github.com/greggb/sublime-snazzy

# Update the binary cache
bat cache --build

Finally, use bat --list-themes to check if the new themes are available.

Adding or changing file type associations

You can add new (or change existing) file name patterns using the --map-syntax command line option. The option takes an argument of the form pattern:syntax where pattern is a glob pattern that is matched against the file name and the absolute file path. The syntax part is the full name of a supported language (use bat --list-languages for an overview).

Note: You probably want to use this option as an entry in bat's configuration file for persistence instead of passing it on the command line as a one-off. Generally you'd just use -l if you want to manually specify a language for a file.

Example: To use "INI" syntax highlighting for all files with a .conf file extension, use

--map-syntax='*.conf:INI'

Example: To open all files called .ignore (exact match) with the "Git Ignore" syntax, use:

--map-syntax='.ignore:Git Ignore'

Example: To open all .conf files in subfolders of /etc/apache2 with the "Apache Conf" syntax, use (this mapping is already built in):

--map-syntax='/etc/apache2/**/*.conf:Apache Conf'

Using a different pager

bat uses the pager that is specified in the PAGER environment variable. If this variable is not set, less is used by default. If you want to use a different pager, you can either modify the PAGER variable or set the BAT_PAGER environment variable to override what is specified in PAGER.

Note

If PAGER is more or most, bat will silently use less instead to ensure support for colors.

If you want to pass command-line arguments to the pager, you can also set them via the PAGER/BAT_PAGER variables:

export BAT_PAGER="less -RF"

Instead of using environment variables, you can also use bats configuration file to configure the pager (--pager option).

Using less as a pager

When using less as a pager, bat will automatically pass extra options along to less to improve the experience. Specifically, -R/--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS, -F/--quit-if-one-screen, and under certain conditions, -X/--no-init and/or -S/--chop-long-lines.

Important

These options will not be added if:

• The pager is not named less.
• The --pager argument contains any command-line arguments (e.g. --pager="less -R").
• The BAT_PAGER environment variable contains any command-line arguments (e.g. export BAT_PAGER="less -R")

The --quit-if-one-screen option will not be added when:

• The --paging=always argument is used.
• The BAT_PAGING environment is set to always.

The -R option is needed to interpret ANSI colors correctly.

The -F option instructs less to exit immediately if the output size is smaller than the vertical size of the terminal. This is convenient for small files because you do not have to press q to quit the pager.

The -X option is needed to fix a bug with the --quit-if-one-screen feature in versions of less older than version 530. Unfortunately, it also breaks mouse-wheel support in less. If you want to enable mouse-wheel scrolling on older versions of less and do not mind losing the quit-if-one-screen feature, you can set the pager (via --pager or BAT_PAGER) to less -R. For less 530 or newer, it should work out of the box.

The -S option is added when bat's -S/--chop-long-lines option is used. This tells less to truncate any lines larger than the terminal width.

Indentation

bat expands tabs to 4 spaces by itself, not relying on the pager. To change this, simply add the --tabs argument with the number of spaces you want to be displayed.

Note: Defining tab stops for the pager (via the --pager argument by bat, or via the LESS environment variable for less) won't be taken into account because the pager will already get expanded spaces instead of tabs. This behaviour is added to avoid indentation issues caused by the sidebar. Calling bat with --tabs=0 will override it and let tabs be consumed by the pager.

Dark mode

If you make use of the dark mode feature in macOS, you might want to configure bat to use a different theme based on the OS theme. The following snippet uses the default theme when in the dark mode and the GitHub theme when in the light mode.

alias cat="bat --theme=\$(defaults read -globalDomain AppleInterfaceStyle &> /dev/null && echo default || echo GitHub)"

Configuration file

bat can also be customized with a configuration file. The location of the file is dependent on your operating system. To get the default path for your system, call

bat --config-file

Alternatively, you can use the BAT_CONFIG_PATH environment variable to point bat to a non-default location of the configuration file:

export BAT_CONFIG_PATH="/path/to/bat.conf"

A default configuration file can be created with the --generate-config-file option.

bat --generate-config-file

There is also now a systemwide configuration file, which is located under /etc/bat/config on Linux and Mac OS and C:\ProgramData\bat\config on windows. If the system wide configuration file is present, the content of the user configuration will simply be appended to it.

Format

The configuration file is a simple list of command line arguments. Use bat --help to see a full list of possible options and values. In addition, you can add comments by prepending a line with the # character.

Example configuration file:

# Set the theme to "TwoDark"
--theme="TwoDark"

# Show line numbers, Git modifications and file header (but no grid)
--style="numbers,changes,header"

# Use italic text on the terminal (not supported on all terminals)
--italic-text=always

# Use C++ syntax for Arduino .ino files
--map-syntax "*.ino:C++"

Using bat on Windows

bat mostly works out-of-the-box on Windows, but a few features may need extra configuration.

Prerequisites

You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.

Paging

Windows only includes a very limited pager in the form of more. You can download a Windows binary for less from its homepage or through Chocolatey. To use it, place the binary in a directory in your PATH or define an environment variable. The Chocolatey package installs less automatically.

Colors

Windows 10 natively supports colors in both conhost.exe (Command Prompt) and PowerShell since v1511, as well as in newer versions of bash. On earlier versions of Windows, you can use Cmder, which includes ConEmu.

Note: Old versions of less do not correctly interpret colors on Windows. To fix this, you can add the optional Unix tools to your PATH when installing Git. If you don’t have any other pagers installed, you can disable paging entirely by passing --paging=never or by setting BAT_PAGER to an empty string.

Cygwin

bat on Windows does not natively support Cygwin's unix-style paths (/cygdrive/*). When passed an absolute cygwin path as an argument, bat will encounter the following error: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)

This can be solved by creating a wrapper or adding the following function to your .bash_profile file:

bat() {
    local index
    local args=("$@")
    for index in $(seq 0 ${#args[@]}) ; do
        case "${args[index]}" in
        -*) continue;;
        *)  [ -e "${args[index]}" ] && args[index]="$(cygpath --windows "${args[index]}")";;
        esac
    done
    command bat "${args[@]}"
}

Troubleshooting

Garbled output

If an input file contains color codes or other ANSI escape sequences or control characters, bat will have problems performing syntax highlighting and text wrapping, and thus the output can become garbled. When displaying such files it is recommended to disable both syntax highlighting and wrapping by passing the --color=never --wrap=never options to bat.

Terminals & colors

bat handles terminals with and without truecolor support. However, the colors in most syntax highlighting themes are not optimized for 8-bit colors. It is therefore strongly recommended that you use a terminal with 24-bit truecolor support (terminator, konsole, iTerm2, ...), or use one of the basic 8-bit themes designed for a restricted set of colors. See this article for more details and a full list of terminals with truecolor support.

Make sure that your truecolor terminal sets the COLORTERM variable to either truecolor or 24bit. Otherwise, bat will not be able to determine whether or not 24-bit escape sequences are supported (and fall back to 8-bit colors).

Line numbers and grid are hardly visible

Please try a different theme (see bat --list-themes for a list). The OneHalfDark and OneHalfLight themes provide grid and line colors that are brighter.

File encodings

bat natively supports UTF-8 as well as UTF-16. For every other file encoding, you may need to convert to UTF-8 first because the encodings can typically not be auto-detected. You can iconv to do so. Example: if you have a PHP file in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding, you can call:

iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 my-file.php | bat

Note: you might have to use the -l/--language option if the syntax can not be auto-detected by bat.

Development

# Recursive clone to retrieve all submodules
git clone --recursive https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

# Build (debug version)
cd bat
cargo build --bins

# Run unit tests and integration tests
cargo test

# Install (release version)
cargo install --path . --locked

# Build a bat binary with modified syntaxes and themes
bash assets/create.sh
cargo install --path . --locked --force

If you want to build an application that uses bats pretty-printing features as a library, check out the the API documentation. Note that you have to use either regex-onig or regex-fancy as a feature when you depend on bat as a library.

Contributing

Take a look at the CONTRIBUTING.md guide.

Maintainers

• sharkdp
• eth-p
• keith-hall
• Enselic

Security vulnerabilities

Please contact David Peter via email if you want to report a vulnerability in bat.

Project goals and alternatives

bat tries to achieve the following goals:

• Provide beautiful, advanced syntax highlighting
• Integrate with Git to show file modifications
• Be a drop-in replacement for (POSIX) cat
• Offer a user-friendly command-line interface

There are a lot of alternatives, if you are looking for similar programs. See this document for a comparison.

License

Copyright (c) 2018-2023 bat-developers.

bat is made available under the terms of either the MIT License or the Apache License 2.0, at your option.

See the LICENSE-APACHE and LICENSE-MIT files for license details.

bat's Issues

Don't stop on error

When attempting to print a directory, an error is returned. ([bat error]: Is a directory (os error 21)).
It would be nice if, when given multiple files, bat would then just move on to the next file.

To reproduce:

$ mkdir foo_dir
$ echo foo > foo_file
$ cat * 2> /dev/null
foo
$ bat * 2> /dev/null
$

brew install option

Hello,

Do you think a brew install method will be available soon ?

Add some basic documentation for less integration

I suspect a lot of use cases of bat are of integration with less.

I suggest adding some documentation on this. What is needed is already written on #29 , namely

export LESS="-R"
Is needed for the bat blah|less to work

and

export LESSOPEN="| bat %s"
export LESS="-R"

Is need for less to use bat automatically

Bat requires glibc 2.18 - CentOS 7 only offers glibc 2.17

On CentOS 7.4.1708, when trying to run bat, there is a GLIBC version problem error

/lib64/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.18' not found (required by ./bat)

CentOS 7 only offers glibc 2.17

bat init-cache failed

i've followed steps from readme, but got this:

➜   bat init-cache
[bat error]: Could not load themes from '/Users/xxxxx/Library/Preferences/bat/themes'

i thought it maybe writing in linux context, so i copied files from ~/.config/bat into ~/Library/Preferences/bat/, still not working.

Add instructions for openssl installation

See https://github.com/sfackler/rust-openssl

# On Debian and Ubuntu
sudo apt-get install pkg-config libssl-dev
# On Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S openssl
# On Fedora
sudo dnf install openssl-devel

Any plans to support syntax highlighting for emacs org-mode file?

Hi, do you have any plans to support syntax highlighting for emacs org-mode file, which is also a markup language?

org-mode: https://orgmode.org

An example:

Wrong parameter parsing.

Obiviously, as depicted below, bat command recognizes filename (R-language source code) as subcommand.

If this error doesn't come from my misuse, i'll fix it.

publish package to debian repositories

it would be nice to have bat as a regular debian package so that we can install it via apt.

Elixir syntax

Doesn't work with: https://github.com/elixir-editors/elixir-tmbundle

thread main panicked on Result::unwrap() with simple js file

> cat index2.js
const io

> bat index2.js
thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: 
Error(-114, target of repeat operator is invalid)', libcore/result.rs:945:5

This appears to be syntax related, if I change the file name to .py it works

> mv index2.js index2.py

> bat index2.py
───────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File index2.py
───────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ const io
───────┴────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

I'm using the sample from the readme for the syntax definitions

mkdir -p ~/.config/bat/syntax
cd ~/.config/bat/syntax

# Download some language definition files, for example:
git clone https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages/
rm -rf Packages/Markdown
git clone https://github.com/jonschlinkert/sublime-markdown-extended

Handle broken output pipes

Build dependencies - cmake

Hi, I've tried to build bat on a Mac OS system and I have realized that there is a dependency to cmake to have the cargo build complete. Can you update the readme please?

Text wrapping

Is there any plan for text wrapping? The output right now is so polished, lines too long look pretty out-of-place. Definitely understand not wrapping by default, but having a flag for it would be pretty chill I think.

TOML support

Hey! Looks like TOML support is missing. Sorry if this issue should be on one of your dependencies and not this repo :).

I added it with the README's instruction for syntax support, but might be nice to include by default, especially since this tool is written in Rust!

Do not fail on regex errors

Unfortuntately, syntect may panic! if there are errors in the syntax definition regular expressions (see trishume/syntect#98).

Syntax highlighting for JSON

I am using version 0.2.2 on Linux and apparently bat does not colorize .json files.

Add Markdown support

Unfortunately, Markdown does not seem to be included in syntects default set.

It would be extra-cool if bat could syntax-highlight the code blocks in the correct language 😄

Get git repository from file path instead of current directory

Inside the repo:

some/folder/repo > bat test.md

▶ bat test.md
───────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File test.md
───────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
...
  19   │ 
  20 + │ <div>
  21 + │ huhu
  22 + │ </div>
───────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Outside the repo:

some/folder > bat repo/test.md

▶ bat test.md
───────┬─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File test.md
───────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
...
  19   │ 
  20   │ <div>
  21   │ huhu
  22   │ </div>
───────┴─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

cat-like behavior while piping

I could use this as an shell alias for cat if it disabled all formatting/syntax-highlighting when it detects that the output stream is piped to another process (i.e. not a tty). But also have an option to force syntax-highlighting for use-cases such as bat myfile.json --force-syntax-hi | head.

Support terminals with no true color support

.. by using 8 bit ANSI sequences instead of 24 bit true color ANSI sequences.

Unable to run `cargo install bat`

Here is the log:

$ cargo install bat
^V    Updating registry `https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index`
  Installing bat v0.2.3
 Downloading backtrace v0.3.7
 Downloading rustc-demangle v0.1.8
 Downloading cfg-if v0.1.3
 Downloading cmake v0.1.31
   Compiling unicode-normalization v0.1.6
   Compiling stable_deref_trait v1.0.0
   Compiling serde v1.0.45
   Compiling dtoa v0.4.2
   Compiling regex-syntax v0.4.2
   Compiling bitflags v0.9.1
   Compiling void v1.0.2
   Compiling cfg-if v0.1.3
   Compiling matches v0.1.6
   Compiling bitflags v1.0.3
   Compiling safemem v0.2.0
   Compiling regex v0.2.11
   Compiling winapi v0.3.4
   Compiling lazy_static v0.2.11
   Compiling plist v0.2.4
   Compiling byteorder v1.2.2
   Compiling lazy_static v1.0.0
   Compiling pkg-config v0.3.11
   Compiling same-file v1.0.2
   Compiling percent-encoding v1.0.1
   Compiling utf8-ranges v1.0.0
   Compiling ansi_term v0.9.0
   Compiling linked-hash-map v0.5.1
   Compiling unicode-xid v0.1.0
   Compiling num-traits v0.2.2
   Compiling unicode-width v0.1.4
   Compiling fnv v1.0.6
   Compiling cc v1.0.15
   Compiling ansi_term v0.11.0
   Compiling strsim v0.7.0
   Compiling rustc-demangle v0.1.8
   Compiling ucd-util v0.1.1
   Compiling itoa v0.4.1
   Compiling smallvec v0.6.1
   Compiling libc v0.2.40
   Compiling owning_ref v0.3.3
   Compiling unreachable v1.0.0
   Compiling unicode-bidi v0.3.4
   Compiling xml-rs v0.7.0
   Compiling base64 v0.8.0
   Compiling bincode v1.0.0
   Compiling walkdir v2.1.4
   Compiling yaml-rust v0.4.0
   Compiling proc-macro2 v0.3.8
   Compiling num-integer v0.1.36
   Compiling regex-syntax v0.5.6
   Compiling serde_json v1.0.17
   Compiling thread_local v0.3.5
   Compiling term_size v0.3.1
   Compiling clicolors-control v0.2.0
   Compiling rand v0.4.2
   Compiling time v0.1.39
   Compiling atty v0.2.10
   Compiling termios v0.2.2
   Compiling memchr v2.0.1
   Compiling libz-sys v1.0.18
   Compiling backtrace-sys v0.1.16
   Compiling cmake v0.1.31
   Compiling miniz-sys v0.1.10
   Compiling quote v0.5.2
   Compiling textwrap v0.9.0
   Compiling parking_lot_core v0.2.14
   Compiling chrono v0.4.2
error[E0432]: unresolved import `std::sync::atomic::spin_loop_hint`
  --> .cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/parking_lot_core-0.2.14/src/spinwait.rs:14:5
   |
14 | use std::sync::atomic::spin_loop_hint;
   |     ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ no `spin_loop_hint` in `sync::atomic`

error: aborting due to previous error

error: Could not compile `parking_lot_core`.
warning: build failed, waiting for other jobs to finish...
error: failed to compile `bat v0.2.3`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `/tmp/cargo-install.rCS7oWKs408U`

Caused by:
  build failed

Screenshot here:

Here is my Ubuntu Linux version info:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 16.04.3 LTS
Release:        16.04
Codename:       xenial

My Ubuntu is run under Bash on Ubuntu on Windows in my Windows 10 ver 1803 (OS Build 17134.1).

Add more Git features

Just a few ideas:

• Add a --staged option to show staged changes. => this would require us to read the file from the Git index.
• Add a --context N option to only show the lines associated with changes
• (Add a way to specify a git commit/tag/branch to show the file contents from the git index.)

Any support syntax styling (indent, tab, etc..) from .editorconfig ?

Well, bat is not really an 'editor',

but It'll be really nice if bat supports syntax styling with .editorconfig.

Handle non-interactive terminals properly

Handle edge cases

• Very large files => make sure that line number output looks okay
• Binary files => do not attempt to output anything. Instead, print some statistics?
• Lines with no line-ending => Indicate this in a similar way to cat(1)?
• Lines with wrong faulty Unicode characters => print �
• Filenames which are non-UTF8 compatible
• different line ending formats (\n, \r, etc.)

Proper handling of syntax highlighting themes

• Use syntect-internal default theme if ~/.config/bat/themes/ does not contain anything.
• Make theme configurable via command line option (or use Default.tmTheme symlink?)

Add Git support

• Show a +, - or ~ indicator for lines/hunks that have been added, removed or modified (similar to https://github.com/airblade/vim-gitgutter)

Automatic paging

First off, this is nice :).

Have you thought about adding git-style automatic paging to it? If the lines fit on one screen, it would not do paging (like the current behavior). But as soon as it's more than one screen, it could automatically page.

That's one of the things that git got right IMO.

Default colorschemes for light terminals

Hi! I just found this tool and it would be super nice if there was a way to use it for terminals with a light background color (e.g. solarized light). I'm just hoping there's a quick way to provide a dark colorscheme by default.

Thanks alot for making this!

Use XDG-compliant config and cache directories

Filter to only include hunks?

First: congrats on the release, and props for creatively putting together the pieces that make this work!

Anyway: It'd be really neat if this could be used as an alternative to the default pager in Git -- this is REALLY nice-looking, and I'd love to use this as a pager. Would you be open to a PR or implementing yourself a feature to filter out everything that's not a hunk in a diff? I'm not sure if this should be a special way to process diff/patch files or just integrated with libgit2 directly -- the latter is probably easier, since you're already using libgit2 as a dependency.

Performance tweaks

Possible options to improve performance:

• Do not parse syntax definitions (and themes) from files, include them in the binary (like syntect does)
• Run the computation of the Git differences in parallel while the syntax definitions are loaded.

Missing libcurl-gnutls.so.4 with Fedora or CentOS prevents execution

When running bat via the releases bat-v0.2.0-x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu.tar.gz , it complains about a missing shared library:
error while loading shared libraries: libcurl-gnutls.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

There is no libcurl-gnutls in CentOS per https://www.centos.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=64227

Panic on some input

Given the file test.md:

Test

<div>
</div>

Running bat test.md panics:

% bat test.md            
───────┬────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
       │ File test.md
───────┼────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
   1   │ Test
   2   │ 
thread 'main' panicked at 'called `Result::unwrap()` on an `Err` value: Error(-122, invalid pattern in look-behind)', libcore/result.rs:945:5
stack backtrace:
   0: std::sys::unix::backtrace::tracing::imp::unwind_backtrace
             at libstd/sys/unix/backtrace/tracing/gcc_s.rs:49
   1: std::sys_common::backtrace::print
             at libstd/sys_common/backtrace.rs:71
             at libstd/sys_common/backtrace.rs:59
   2: std::panicking::default_hook::{{closure}}
             at libstd/panicking.rs:205
   3: std::panicking::default_hook
             at libstd/panicking.rs:221
   4: std::panicking::rust_panic_with_hook
             at libstd/panicking.rs:457
   5: std::panicking::begin_panic_fmt
             at libstd/panicking.rs:344
   6: rust_begin_unwind
             at libstd/panicking.rs:322
   7: core::panicking::panic_fmt
             at libcore/panicking.rs:71
   8: core::result::unwrap_failed
   9: syntect::parsing::syntax_definition::MatchPattern::compile_with_refs
  10: syntect::parsing::parser::ParseState::parse_line
  11: syntect::easy::HighlightLines::highlight
  12: bat::run
  13: bat::main
  14: std::rt::lang_start::{{closure}}
  15: std::panicking::try::do_call
             at libstd/rt.rs:59
             at libstd/panicking.rs:304
  16: __rust_maybe_catch_panic
             at libpanic_unwind/lib.rs:105
  17: std::rt::lang_start_internal
             at libstd/panicking.rs:283
             at libstd/panic.rs:361
             at libstd/rt.rs:58
  18: main
  19: __libc_start_main
  20: _start

Collection of Syntaxes Available

I have a pasting service that also uses syntect, and I have a bit of a collection of syntaxes to potentially contribute. I believe many were converted from tmbundles using a ruby gem for this purpose, but they seem to work well enough in my experience. Some of these may already been included, and so I'll list them as a checklist.

• Agda
• Assembly x86
• Befunge 93
• Coq
• CSS (Django)
• F#
• Handlebars
• HTML (Django)
• Idris
• Isabelle
• Lean
• Less
• Nearley
• Nix
• Pony
• Prolog
• Python (Django)
• Racket
• TOML
• Vue

They're all available in an archive here.
(Sorry in advance, but I unfortunately didn't keep track of the source 😦)

Heads-up: a FreeBSD port of bat is on its way

Hello!

I just wanted to point out that bat is on its way be included in the FreeBSD ports collection (pending PR). At the moment the problem is with the dictionaries dependency.

Cheers and happy hacking!

thread 'main' panicked at 'no entry found for key', libcore/option.rs:917:5

I'm using latest stable rust (1.25.0) and installed bat via cargo install bat. Trying it on some file throws an error message.

Is this a bug or did cargo

thread 'main' panicked at 'no entry found for key', libcore/option.rs:917:5
stack backtrace:
   0: std::sys::unix::backtrace::tracing::imp::unwind_backtrace
             at libstd/sys/unix/backtrace/tracing/gcc_s.rs:49
   1: std::sys_common::backtrace::_print
             at libstd/sys_common/backtrace.rs:71
   2: std::panicking::default_hook::{{closure}}
             at libstd/sys_common/backtrace.rs:59
             at libstd/panicking.rs:380
   3: std::panicking::default_hook
             at libstd/panicking.rs:396
   4: std::panicking::rust_panic_with_hook
             at libstd/panicking.rs:576
   5: std::panicking::begin_panic
             at libstd/panicking.rs:537
   6: std::panicking::begin_panic_fmt
             at libstd/panicking.rs:521
   7: rust_begin_unwind
             at libstd/panicking.rs:497
   8: core::panicking::panic_fmt
             at libcore/panicking.rs:71
   9: core::option::expect_failed
             at libcore/option.rs:917
  10: bat::main
  11: std::rt::lang_start::{{closure}}
  12: std::panicking::try::do_call
             at libstd/rt.rs:59
             at libstd/panicking.rs:479
  13: __rust_maybe_catch_panic
             at libpanic_unwind/lib.rs:102
  14: std::rt::lang_start_internal
             at libstd/panicking.rs:458
             at libstd/panic.rs:358
             at libstd/rt.rs:58
  15: main
  16: __libc_start_main
  17: _start

Add pretty-printing options?

For files such as JSON, CSV, etc.?

Add CURL support

... so we can do things like

bat https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sharkdp/bat/master/src/main.rs

or just do it the UNIX way 😄

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sharkdp/bat/master/src/main.rs | bat

Both cases would probably require us to infer the programming language from the file contents.

Add a --language option to explicitly specify the programming language

Provide a "less" interactive mode

First, thanks for this awesome tool. Here is my feature request:
provide a less-like browsable mode, usefull for large files.
This is needed because there is no obvious way to colorize less input which makes bat ... | less unusable.

Do not exit on errors

If we call bat file1 file2 file3, we should still output file3 if file2 is erroneous.

The exit code should still be nonzero.

As another example, see #27

Add support for reading from stdin?

Also, allow - as a path argument

Default behavior when output is sent to a file

I, for one, prefer the way exa handles this. To wit,

With exa, I've aliased ls and everything's been fine. I'd consider doing the same for bat if we could get non-colorized output and byte-for-byte copying when the output isn't a terminal ("catting to a file"). Perhaps via a config. If that's not your goal, that's fine too. 👍

Cool project, btw.

Git modifications not shown from child folder

Add option to disable line numbers

... and Git modification-markers.

Installation with rust 1.20.0 fails

I tried to install bat with cargo, but got some error[E0277] messages. After updating to lastest version installation works fine.

Is this a bug or is expecting / using latest rust version a default for rust software I wasn't aware of?

# failing
$ cargo -V
cargo 0.21.0 (5b4b8b2ae 2017-08-12)

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.20.0 (f3d6973f4 2017-08-27)

# successfull
$ cargo -V
cargo 0.26.0 (41480f5cc 2018-02-26)

$ rustc --version
rustc 1.25.0 (84203cac6 2018-03-25)

---

Example error message for reference purpose

$ cargo install bat
[ ... ]
error[E0277]: the trait bound `std::option::Option<std::collections::HashMap<u32, LineChange>>: std::ops::Try` is not satisfied
   --> /home/kbite/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/bat-0.1.0/src/main.rs:120:16
    |
120 |        let diff = repo.diff_index_to_workdir(None, Some(&mut diff_options))
    |   ________________-
    |  |________________|
    | ||
121 | ||         .ok()?;
    | ||              -
    | ||______________|
    | |_______________the `?` operator can only be used in a function that returns `Result` (or another type that implements `std::ops::Try`)
    |                 in this macro invocation
    |
    = help: the trait `std::ops::Try` is not implemented for `std::option::Option<std::collections::HashMap<u32, LineChange>>`
    = note: required by `std::ops::Try::from_error`

error: aborting due to 5 previous errors

error: failed to compile `bat v0.1.0`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `/tmp/cargo-install.1dfJ32nRGNx6`

Caused by:
  Could not compile `bat`.

Provide a man page

Offer a linux manual page for utility description.

Any plans to package it to Deb/Rpm or etc??

Might be really great to just download from package repo.
(without using cargo)

Any chances to deploy with openSUSE's Build Service?
https://software.opensuse.org/