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):

Installation

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

From source

If you want to build to compile bat from source, you need Rust 1.22 or higher. Make sure that you have the devel-version of libopenssl installed (see instructions here). You can then use cargo to build everything:

cargo install bat

Customization

bat uses the excellent syntect library for syntax highlighting. syntect can read any Sublime Text language definitions and highlighting theme.

To build your own syntax-set and theme, follow these steps:

Create a folder with syntax highlighting theme:

mkdir -p ~/.config/bat/themes
cd ~/.config/bat/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 ~/.config/bat/syntax
cd ~/.config/bat/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 init-cache