[iefbr14]

cat <whatever> | highlight --force -O xterm256 | less -SRNI

works fine for me.

[freddie_mercury]

That has git integration, like bat does? That shows non-printable characters like bat does? That allows you to concatenate and page multiple files at once like bat does? That supports the --line-range option like bat does? You can pipe the output of tail -f through your alias?

I guess if all you did was read the headline of the post you could assume your alias does all the same things as bat.

[hnlmorg]

Not the GP and I do like bat, but to answer your questions:

> That shows non-printable characters like bat does?

cat does actually support that via the flags with -v (you can also use -t and -e to view tab and line endings too)

> That allows you to concatenate and page multiple files at once like bat does?

cat is literally called “cat” because it’s intended purpose is concatenation.

It’s not a pager though the GPs example did pipe to less anyway.

> That supports the --line-range option like bat does?

‘tail’ and ‘head’ would be muscle memory to a lot of people and not that different in terms of number of keystrokes.

But I do take your point that it’s nice to have that built into your pager.

> You can pipe the output of tail -f through your alias?

I couldn’t see why not. tail -f isn’t doing anything weird with the fd.

———

I’m not arguing against using bat though. I have it aliased to cat on my own machines, so I clearly and would recommend bat. But I do think some people might be surprised how far you can get with coreutils if bat wasn’t available

[petepete]

It's clearly a joke in the vein of being able to recreate Dropbox with an FTP account, curlftpfs, and SVN/CVS.

[feelamee]

looks like you are right, but... I almost never used all of this features with bat. Maybe tail -f sometimes. Do you really need this in daily workflow?

[spookie]

I call cat when I need to pipe or copy something, and just bat if I wanna read it myself. I find this as a good compromise, I like how bat formats things.

Your solution would be ok with an alias as well, so thanks. Might try it just so I dont need yet another program lying around

[seedie]

You can still pipe bat output as it falls back to unformated output when it detects a non-interactive terminal. https://github.com/sharkdp/bat?tab=readme-ov-file#file-conca...

[b_e_n_t_o_n]

and rsync works fine for people too, I guess that's why nobody uses Dropbox

[yjftsjthsd-h]

Dropbox and rsync do different things. It looks like this does essentially the same thing.

[em-bee]

i tried that:

    cat .bashrc  | highlight --force -O xterm256 | less -SRNI

everything is green, except line numbers are black (which comes from less), but

    bat .bashrc

shows actual syntax highlighting.

so apparently, no, it doesn't work.

to be fair, this is how it works:

   cat .bashrc | highlight --syntax shellscript -O ansi | less -R

to avoid getting caught by the useless use of cat police, this does too:

   highlight --syntax shellscript -O ansi .bashrc | less -R

however, i have to tell it which syntax to use

but to its credit, highlight even has support for pike, which bat doesn't (yet) (fixed that for myself, at least)

so overall, bat wins.

[em-bee]

oh, i feel stupid now, the reason bat worked and highlight didn't was because bat had access to the filename extension. if highlight is called with a filename argument it can detect the syntax too.

so really bat and hightlight are equal, and it's not just a useless use of cat, but using cat here actually breaks the syntax detection. and it does so in bat too, obviously.

so this means highlight almost wins because it has pike support already, whereas for bat i had to add it, except that it turns out that if highlight can't detect the syntax it produces nothing, and you need --force to fix that, and if it is given multiple files as arguments it writes the output to files too, which is practically never what i want so i need to fix that with --stdout.

bat it is.

[ikurei]

Although I agree with other commenters that your command can't compare to all of bat's features, many of which I appreciate... thank you for sharing this tip, I didn't know about `highlight` and I can't install `bat` at work.

This will live in my .bashrc for a long time:

    cat() {
      if [[ -t 1 ]]; then
        command cat "$@" | highlight --force -O xterm256
      else
        # plain cat to pipe into other things
        command cat "$@"
      fi
    }

[dTal]

This... doesn't work? Everything just comes out green. It's not clear to me how 'highlight' could even possibly know what syntax it's supposed to be highlighting when processing stdin, unless it ingests the whole thing until EOF and then applies some kind of fuzzy logic. If you feed it a filename as an argument, it just checks the extension.

[em-bee]

curious, how did you have highlight installed?

i'd change the third line so you can actually get syntax highlighting:

    command highlight --stdout --force -O xterm256 "$@"

[MisterTea]

You don't need cat:

  highlight --force -O xterm256 < whatever | less -SRNI

[dicytea]

Sadly does not work on fish because the developers does not believe that users are intelligent enough to understand the obvious and intuitive outcome of flipping ">" (a valid operator in fish).

[MangoToupe]

I don't seem to have "highlight" on my system.

[JdeBP]

That's because it is in ports rather than in base. (-:

* https://freshports.org/textproc/highlight/

* https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/textproc/hi...

* http://ports.su/textproc/highlight

* https://ports.macports.org/port/highlight/

[postepowanieadm]

But it's not in rust.