[lucasoshiro]

> bat it's a useless cat

I can't see bat as a "useless cat" or a replacement for cat except for reading source code in the terminal. It's more a like a less with syntax highlight or a read-only vim.

[ed_blackburn]

I agree with this. cat is great for "cating" bat is great for throwing shit on the terminal in a fashion that makes it semantically easier to reason with, two different use cases.

[anthk]

There's ccze which colorizes stuff without creating a supposed cat(1) replacement.

[godshatter]

Is there a stand-alone syntax highlighting cli tool? It sounds like we need one if one doesn't exist yet. Something that would take an input stream, a language parameter, and maybe an optional color syntax highlighting config or something. It would be something that can be tacked onto any command so the final output has the appropriate syntax highlighting.

[drob518]

Part of the problem is “naming/marketing.” Bat compares ITSELF to cat, not to more/less. IMO, this confuses the issue.

[ziml77]

I think that's because it's super common to use cat to quickly view a file. It has the nice property of using your terminal's scrollback rather than putting you into a pager application. For that use-case it is an alternative to cat.

That said, I've never really cared much about missing syntax highlighting for cases where I'm viewing file contents with cat. So the tool doesn't really serve a purpose for me and instead I'll continue to load up vim/neovim if I want to view a file with syntax highlighting.

[listeria]

Maybe it should be called "lest"? As in a less/most replacement written in rust. Although it does divert from the theme of more/less/most.