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):
Automatic paging
bat
can pipe its own output to less
if the output is too large for one screen.
File concatenation
Oh.. you can also use it to concatenate files :wink:. Whenever
bat
detects a non-interactive terminal, it will fall back to printing
the plain file contents.
How to use
Display a single file on the terminal
> bat
Display multiple files at once
> bat
Read from stdin, explicitly specify the language
> yaml2json | |
> curl |
As a replacement for cat
:
Installation
From binaries
Check out the Release page for binary builds and Debian packages.
On Arch Linux
You can install the AUR package via yaourt, or manually:
On FreeBSD
You can install a precompiled bat
package with pkg:
or build it on your own from the FreeBSD ports:
On macOS
You can install bat
with Homebrew:
From source
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:
On macOS, you might have to install cmake
(brew install cmake
) in order for
some dependencies to be built.
Customization
Highlighting theme
Use bat --list-themes
to get a list of all available themes for syntax
highlighting. To select the TwoDark
theme, for example, call bat
with
the --theme=TwoDark
option. Use alias bat="bat --theme=TwoDark"
in your
shells startup file to make the change permanent.
Output style
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.
Add new syntaxes and highlighting themes
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=""
# Download a theme, for example:
# Create a link for the default theme
Create a folder with language definition files:
# Download some language definition files, for example:
Finally, use the following command to parse all these files into a binary cache:
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:
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.