Tools | bat > cat

December 31, 2024

tools cli terminal

Bat

There are some eternal tools and cat is one of them. It has not appreciably changed much for an eternity. Recently I have stumbled upon a site called Terminal Trove. A tool missng from their posts is the tool bat. As a developer, and perhaps many Linux users, when I am using cat it is with a script or log snippet. However, without perks like colorization and line numbers it can be difficult to comprehend. This may lead a user to open it in vi or helix to get those benefits. What if you didn’t have to? That’s where bat enters the picture.

This is what bat looks like with a simple basic toml file.

But bat is also capable of showing white space, is git-aware, and by default uses less for paging.

bat -A keyboards/ploopyco/ploopyco.h

It also can read from stdin

There is a wide range of options including those that allow you to customize the output, add themes, and return to default cat behavior for example.

❯ cat -h
A cat(1) clone with wings.

Usage: bat [OPTIONS] [FILE]...
       bat 

Arguments:
  [FILE]...  File(s) to print / concatenate. Use '-' for standard input.

Options:
  -A, --show-all
          Show non-printable characters (space, tab, newline, ..).
      --nonprintable-notation 
          Set notation for non-printable characters.
  -p, --plain...
          Show plain style (alias for '--style=plain').
  -l, --language 
          Set the language for syntax highlighting.
  -H, --highlight-line 
          Highlight lines N through M.
      --file-name 
          Specify the name to display for a file.
  -d, --diff
          Only show lines that have been added/removed/modified.
      --tabs 
          Set the tab width to T spaces.
      --wrap 
          Specify the text-wrapping mode (*auto*, never, character).
  -S, --chop-long-lines
          Truncate all lines longer than screen width. Alias for '--wrap=never'.
  -n, --number
          Show line numbers (alias for '--style=numbers').
      --color 
          When to use colors (*auto*, never, always).
      --italic-text 
          Use italics in output (always, *never*)
      --decorations 
          When to show the decorations (*auto*, never, always).
      --paging 
          Specify when to use the pager, or use `-P` to disable (*auto*, never, always).
  -m, --map-syntax 
          Use the specified syntax for files matching the glob pattern ('*.cpp:C++').
      --theme 
          Set the color theme for syntax highlighting.
      --list-themes
          Display all supported highlighting themes.
      --style 
          Comma-separated list of style elements to display (*default*, auto, full, plain,
          changes, header, header-filename, header-filesize, grid, rule, numbers, snip).
  -r, --line-range 
          Only print the lines from N to M.
  -L, --list-languages
          Display all supported languages.
  -h, --help
          Print help (see more with '--help')
  -V, --version
          Print version

Install

The installation is straight forward. If you have the Rust toolchain installed building from source is an option.

cargo install --locked bat

Or using your package manager.

sudo zypper install bat bat-bash-completion bat-fish-completion

Integrate with Fish

As seen above there are fish completions available on OpenSUSE. One option to avoid muscle memory of typing cat vs bat would be to use a fish alias but that isn’t quite enough. There is a convinience flag that is just too much typing to get a pagerless output. This custom override for the cat command gives you a nice flag to get basic output as well as only overriding the cat command in interactive mode.

# Utilizes bat when in user shell to get prettier code prints but
# reverts to cat when not to prevent interfering with other scripts.
function cat --description "alias cat bat"
    if status --is-interactive
        # Initialize an empty list for the arguments
        set -l args
        for arg in $argv
            # Replace '-a' with '--pager=never' in each argument, if applicable
            if [ "$arg" = "-a" ]
                set new_arg "--pager=never"
            else
                set new_arg $arg
            end
            # Add the processed argument (either modified or unchanged) to the args list
            set args $args $new_arg
        end

        # In interactive mode, use bat
        command bat $args
    else
        # In non-interactive mode, use cat
        command cat $argv
    end
end

As seen above the override only happens under interactive use. Additionally, it adds flag -a as an alias of --pager=never to save a few keystrokes. The command now to get plain cat output would be cat -a -p. Using the keyword command to execute cat and bat also maintains the correct fish completions based on the underlying command being run.

That is all for this installment. Look forward to more posts just like this.