bat

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

Key Features • How To Use • Installation • Customization • Project goals, alternatives
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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):

Show non-printable characters

You can use the -A/--show-all option to show and highlight non-printable characters:

Automatic paging

By default, bat pipes its own output to a pager (e.g. less) if the output is too large for one screen. If you would rather bat work like cat all the time (never page output), you can set --paging=never as an option, either on the command line or in your configuration file. If you intend to alias cat to bat in your shell configuration, you can use alias cat='bat --paging=never' to preserve the default behavior.

File concatenation

Even with a pager set, you can still use bat to concatenate files :wink:. Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e. when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents, regardless of the --pager option's value.

How to use

Display a single file on the terminal

> bat README.md

Display multiple files at once

> bat src/*.rs

Read from stdin, determine the syntax automatically (note, highlighting will only work if the syntax can be determined from the first line of the file, usually through a shebang such as #!/bin/sh)

> curl -s https://sh.rustup.rs | bat

Read from stdin, specify the language explicitly

> yaml2json .travis.yml | json_pp | bat -l json

Show and highlight non-printable characters:

> bat -A /etc/hosts

Use it as a cat replacement:

bat > note.md  # quickly create a new file

bat header.md content.md footer.md > document.md

bat -n main.rs  # show line numbers (only)

bat f - g  # output 'f', then stdin, then 'g'.

Integration with other tools

fzf

You can use bat as a previewer for fzf. To do this, use bats --color=always option to force colorized output. You can also use --line-range option to restrict the load times for long files:

fzf --preview "bat --color=always --style=numbers --line-range=:500 {}"

For more information, see fzf's README.

find or fd

You can use the -exec option of find to preview all search results with bat:

find … -exec bat {} +

If you happen to use fd, you can use the -X/--exec-batch option to do the same:

fd … -X bat

ripgrep

With batgrep, bat can be used as the printer for ripgrep search results.

batgrep needle src/

tail -f

bat can be combined with tail -f to continuously monitor a given file with syntax highlighting.

tail -f /var/log/pacman.log | bat --paging=never -l log

Note that we have to switch off paging in order for this to work. We have also specified the syntax explicitly (-l log), as it can not be auto-detected in this case.

git

You can combine bat with git show to view an older version of a given file with proper syntax highlighting:

git show v0.6.0:src/main.rs | bat -l rs

git diff

You can combine bat with git diff to view lines around code changes with proper syntax highlighting:

batdiff() {
    git diff --name-only --relative --diff-filter=d | xargs bat --diff
}

If you prefer to use this as a separate tool, check out batdiff in bat-extras.

If you are looking for more support for git and diff operations, check out delta.

xclip

The line numbers and Git modification markers in the output of bat can make it hard to copy the contents of a file. To prevent this, you can call bat with the -p/--plain option or simply pipe the output into xclip:

bat main.cpp | xclip

bat will detect that the output is being redirected and print the plain file contents.

man

bat can be used as a colorizing pager for man, by setting the MANPAGER environment variable:

export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"
man 2 select

(replace bat with batcat if you are on Debian or Ubuntu)

It might also be necessary to set MANROFFOPT="-c" if you experience formatting problems.

If you prefer to have this bundled in a new command, you can also use batman.

Note that the Manpage syntax is developed in this repository and still needs some work.

Also, note that this will not work with Mandocs man implementation.

prettier / shfmt / rustfmt

The prettybat script is a wrapper that will format code and print it with bat.

Highlighting --help messages

You can use bat to colorize help text: $ cp --help | bat -plhelp

You can also use a wrapper around this:

# in your .bashrc/.zshrc/*rc
alias bathelp='bat --plain --language=help'
help() {
    "$@" --help 2>&1 | bathelp
}

Then you can do $ help cp or $ help git commit.

When you are using zsh, you can also use global aliases to override -h and --help entirely:

alias -g -- -h='-h 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'
alias -g -- --help='--help 2>&1 | bat --language=help --style=plain'

This way, you can keep on using cp --help, but get colorized help pages.

Be aware that in some cases, -h may not be a shorthand of --help (for example with ls).

Please report any issues with the help syntax in this repository.

Installation

On Ubuntu (using apt)

... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.

bat is available on Ubuntu since 20.04 ("Focal") and Debian since August 2021 (Debian 11 - "Bullseye").

If your Ubuntu/Debian installation is new enough you can simply run:

sudo apt install bat

Important: If you install bat this way, please note that the executable may be installed as batcat instead of bat (due to a name clash with another package). You can set up a bat -> batcat symlink or alias to prevent any issues that may come up because of this and to be consistent with other distributions:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat

On Ubuntu (using most recent .deb packages)

... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.

If the package has not yet been promoted to your Ubuntu/Debian installation, or you want the most recent release of bat, download the latest .deb package from the release page and install it via:

sudo dpkg -i bat_0.18.3_amd64.deb  # adapt version number and architecture

On Alpine Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources, provided you have the appropriate repository enabled:

apk add bat

On Arch Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources:

pacman -S bat

On Fedora

You can install the bat package from the official Fedora Modular repository.

dnf install bat

On Funtoo Linux

You can install the bat package from dev-kit.

emerge sys-apps/bat

On Gentoo Linux

You can install the bat package from the official sources:

emerge sys-apps/bat

On Void Linux

You can install bat via xbps-install:

xbps-install -S bat

On Termux

You can install bat via pkg:

pkg install bat

On FreeBSD

You can install a precompiled bat package with pkg:

pkg install bat

or build it on your own from the FreeBSD ports:

cd /usr/ports/textproc/bat
make install

On OpenBSD

You can install bat package using pkg_add(1):

pkg_add bat

Via nix

You can install bat using the nix package manager:

nix-env -i bat

Via flox

You can install bat using Flox

flox install bat

On openSUSE

You can install bat with zypper:

zypper install bat

Via snap package

There is currently no recommended snap package available. Existing packages may be available, but are not officially supported and may contain issues.

On macOS (or Linux) via Homebrew

You can install bat with Homebrew:

brew install bat

On macOS via MacPorts

Or install bat with MacPorts:

port install bat

On Windows

There are a few options to install bat on Windows. Once you have installed bat, take a look at the "Using bat on Windows" section.

Prerequisites

You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.

With WinGet

You can install bat via WinGet:

winget install sharkdp.bat

With Chocolatey

You can install bat via Chocolatey:

choco install bat

With Scoop

You can install bat via scoop:

scoop install bat

From prebuilt binaries:

You can download prebuilt binaries from the Release page,

You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.

From binaries

Check out the Release page for prebuilt versions of bat for many different architectures. Statically-linked binaries are also available: look for archives with musl in the file name.

From source

If you want to build bat from source, you need Rust 1.70.0 or higher. You can then use cargo to build everything:

cargo install --locked bat

Note that additional files like the man page or shell completion files can not be installed in this way. They will be generated by cargo and should be available in the cargo target folder (under build).

Customization

Highlighting theme

Use bat --list-themes to get a list of all available themes for syntax highlighting. To select the TwoDark theme, call bat with the --theme=TwoDark option or set the BAT_THEME environment variable to TwoDark. Use export BAT_THEME="TwoDark" in your shell's startup file to make the change permanent. Alternatively, use bats configuration file.

If you want to preview the different themes on a custom file, you can use the following command (you need fzf for this):

bat --list-themes | fzf --preview="bat --theme={} --color=always