bat

A file previewer with syntax highlighting and git integration.
bat homepage

Install

winget install sharkdp.bat
winget install jftuga.less

Scoop bat less

less is a pager for text files that supports syntax highlighting.

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

Get shell completions by running bat --completion ps1

Usage

Display a single file on the terminal

bat README.md

Display multiple files at once

bat *.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 'c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts'

Use it as a cat replacement:

bat > note.md  # quickly create a new file. Exit with Ctrl+C

bat header.md content.md footer.md > document.md # Concatenate (cat) files into one

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

Integration with other tools fzf You can use bat as a previewer for fzf. To do this, use bat --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

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:main.rs | bat -l rs

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

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

clip
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 clip:

bat main.rs | clip

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