A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.
Key Features • How To Use • Installation • Customization • Project goals, alternatives
bat
supports syntax highlighting for a large number of programming and markup
languages:
bat
communicates with git
to show modifications with respect to the index
(see left side bar):
bat
can pipe its own output to less
if the output is too large for one screen.
Oh.. you can also use it to concatenate files 😉. Whenever
bat
detects a non-interactive terminal, it will fall back to printing
the plain file contents.
Display a single file on the terminal
> bat README.md
Display multiple files at once
> bat src/*.rs
Read from stdin, explicitly specify the language
> yaml2json .travis.yml | json_pp | bat -l json
> curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sharkdp/bat/master/src/main.rs | bat -l rs
As a replacement for cat
:
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'.
Check out the Release page for binary builds and Debian packages.
You can install via Pacman:
pacman -S bat
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
You can install bat
with Homebrew:
brew install bat
If you want to build to compile bat
from source, you need Rust 1.24 or
higher. You can then use cargo
to build everything:
cargo install bat
On macOS, you might have to install cmake
(brew install cmake
) in order for
some dependencies to be built.
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 shells startup file to
make the change permanent.
You can use the --style
option to control the appearance of bat
s output.
You can use --style=numbers,changes
, for example, to show only Git changes
and line numbers but no grid and no file header.
bat
uses the excellent syntect
library for syntax highlighting. syntect
can read any
Sublime Text .sublime-syntax
file
and theme.
To build your own language-set and theme, follow these steps:
Create a folder with a syntax highlighting theme:
BAT_CONFIG_DIR="$(bat cache --config-dir)"
mkdir -p "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/themes"
cd "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/themes"
# Download a theme, for example:
git clone https://github.com/greggb/sublime-snazzy
# Create a link for the default theme
ln -sf "sublime-snazzy/Sublime Snazzy.tmTheme" Default.tmTheme
Create a folder with language definition files:
mkdir -p "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/syntaxes"
cd "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/syntaxes"
# Download some language definition files, for example:
git clone https://github.com/sublimehq/Packages
git clone https://github.com/danro/LESS-sublime
Finally, use the following command to parse all these files into a binary cache:
bat cache --init
Use bat --list-languages
and bat --list-themes
to check if all languages and themes are
available.
If you ever want to go back to the default settings, call:
bat cache --clear
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.