If you’re using Linux, you already used the “cat” command, right? It’s a command that opens a file in the terminal window. Bat is a cat command clone. It offers all the same features as the cat. However, it comes up with a number of additional features like syntax highlighting, Git integration, automatic paging, file concatenation etc.
If you need, you can also add other language definitions and new syntaxes, themes and custom pager etc.
Let’s enjoy Bat!
Installing Bat
Bat is available on all the major Linux platforms. Run the following command(s) according to your own Linux distro.
- Ubuntu/Debian
Download the latest DEB package of Bat.
Now, run the following command(s) –
sudo dpkg -i bat_0.9.0_amd64.deb
- OpenSUSE
sudo zypper install bat
- Arch Linux
sudo pacman -S bat
- Generic Linux instruction
You have to build Bat from source. Follow the instructions on Bat official page on GitHub.
Using Bat
Check out all the file extensions and languages Bat support –
bat --list-languages
Let’s check out an HTML file.
bat ~/Desktop/demo.html
Why not check out a bash file?
bat demo-magic.sh
Script – https://github.com/paxtonhare/demo-magic
Need to check out multiple files? Use the following command –
bat demo-magic.sh README.md
You can also tell Bat to show a range of line from a certain file –
bat --line-range 10:20 license.txt
List all the available themes for Bat –
bat --list-themes
Enable a specific theme right away!
bat --theme=Github
You can find out more about Bat on GitHub.
Enjoy!
This is excellent. Thank you.