bat/doc/alternatives.md

Alternatives

The following table tries to give an overview from bats perspective, i.e. we only compare categories which are relevant for bat. Some of these projects have completely different goals and if you are not looking for a program like bat, this comparison might not be for you.

	bat	pygments	highlight	ccat	source-highlight	hicat	coderay	rouge
Drop-in cat replacement	✔️ *	❌	❌	(✔️)	❌	❌ *	❌	❌
Git integration	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌	❌
Automatic paging	✔️	❌	❌	❌	❌	✔️	❌	❌
Languages (circa)	150	300	200	7	80	130	30	130
Extensible (languages, themes)	✔️	(✔️)	(✔️)	❌	(✔️)	❌	❌	❌
Advanced highlighting (e.g. nested syntaxes)	✔️	✔️	(✔️) ?	❌	✔️	✔️	✔️	✔️
Execution time [ms] (jquery-3.3.1.js)	624	789	400	80	300	316	157	695
Execution time [ms] (miniz.c)	66	656	26	8	53	141	75	254
Execution time [ms] (370 kB XML file)	238	487	129	111	110	339	147	359

If you think that some entries in this table are outdated or wrong, please open a ticket or pull request.

Some other alternatives that are also related, but not yet included in the table:

• lesspipe
• vimpager

Benchmarks

The benchmarks above have been created with this script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" || exit

if ! command -v hyperfine > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "'hyperfine' does not seem to be installed."
    echo "You can get it here: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine"
    exit 1
fi

SRC="test-src/jquery-3.3.1.js"


cmd_bat="bat --style=full --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_bat_simple="bat --plain --wrap=never --tabs=0 --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_pygmentize="pygmentize -g '$SRC'"
cmd_highlight="highlight -O truecolor '$SRC'"
cmd_ccat="ccat --color=always '$SRC'"
cmd_source_highlight="source-highlight --failsafe --infer-lang -f esc -i '$SRC'"
cmd_hicat="hicat '$SRC'"
cmd_coderay="coderay '$SRC'"
cmd_rouge="rougify '$SRC'"

hyperfine --warmup 3 \
    "$cmd_bat" \
    "$cmd_bat_simple" \
    "$cmd_pygmentize" \
    "$cmd_highlight" \
    "$cmd_ccat" \
    "$cmd_source_highlight" \
    "$cmd_hicat" \
    "$cmd_coderay" \
    "$cmd_rouge" \