bat

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

Features

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 😉. Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal, it will fall back to printing the plain file contents.

Installation

From binaries

Check out the Release page for binary builds and Debian packages.

Arch Linux

On Arch Linux, you can install the AUR package via yaourt, or manually:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/bat.git
cd bat
makepkg -si

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:

cargo install bat

On macOS, you might have to install cmake (brew install cmake) in order for some dependencies to be built.

Customization

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/jonschlinkert/sublime-monokai-extended

# Create a 'Default.tmTheme' link
ln -s "sublime-monokai-extended/Monokai Extended.tmTheme" Default.tmTheme

Create a folder with language definition files:

mkdir -p "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/syntax"
cd "$BAT_CONFIG_DIR/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

Finally, use the following command to parse all these files into a binary cache:

bat cache --init

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

bat cache --clear