bat

Basic usage

bat README.md                          # Display a file with syntax highlighting.
bat src/*.rs                           # Display multiple files at once.
bat -n main.rs                         # Show line numbers only.
bat -A /etc/hosts                      # Show non-printable characters.
curl -s https://example.com | bat -l html  # Pipe from stdin with explicit language.

bat detects the language from the file extension or shebang line. When piped to another process, bat falls back to plain output like cat.

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

bat pipes its own output to a pager (e.g. less) when output is too large for one screen. To disable paging, set --paging=never — useful when aliasing cat:

alias cat='bat --paging=never'

Integrations

• fzf — use bat as a syntax-highlighted file previewer:

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

• fd — preview search results with bat:

  fd '\.rs$' -X bat
  

• ripgrep — batgrep (from bat-extras) displays ripgrep results via bat:

  batgrep needle src/
  

• man — colorize man pages by setting MANPAGER:

  export MANPAGER="bat -plman"
  

• tail -f — monitor log files with syntax highlighting:

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

bat-extras

bat-extras is a collection of shell scripts that integrate bat with other tools, including batgrep (ripgrep), batman (man pages), batdiff (git diff), and prettybat (code formatting).

Debian/Ubuntu note

On older Ubuntu/Debian releases the executable is named batcat due to a package name conflict. Create an alias or symlink to use it as bat:

alias bat="batcat"
# Or create a symlink:
mkdir -p ~/.local/bin && ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat