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 sidebar):
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 bat's --color=always option to force colorized output. You can also use --line-range
option to restrict the load times for long files:
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:
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="bat -plman"
man 2 select
(on some older Debian or Ubuntu releases, the executable is named batcat instead of bat)
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.
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'
For fish, you can use abbreviations:
abbr -a --position anywhere -- --help '--help | bat -plhelp'
abbr -a --position anywhere -- -h '-h | bat -plhelp'
This way, you can keep on using cp --help, but get colorized help pages.
[!TIP]
To remove these abbreviations later, run:
abbr -e -- --help
abbr -e -- -h
The -- before the abbreviation name is required because --help and -h start with dashes, which would otherwise be interpreted as flags to abbr itself.
Be aware that in some cases, -h may not be a shorthand of --help (for example with ls). In cases where you need to use -h
as a command argument you can prepend \ to the argument (eg. ls \-h) to escape the aliasing defined above.
Please report any issues with the help syntax in this repository.
If your Ubuntu/Debian installation is new enough you can simply run:
sudo apt install bat
Important: On some older Ubuntu/Debian releases, the executable is installed as batcat instead of bat (due to a name
clash with another package). On newer releases, the executable is available as bat. If bat --version does not work after installation, try batcat --version instead. 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:
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:
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 1.79.0 or
higher. You can then use cargo to build everything:
From local source
cargo install --path . --locked
[!NOTE]
The --path . above specifies the directory of the source code and NOT where bat will be installed.
For more information see the docs for cargo install.
From crates.io
cargo install --locked bat
Note that additional files like the man page or shell completion
files can not be installed automatically in both these ways.
If installing from a local source, they will be generated by cargo
and should be available in the cargo target folder under build.
Furthermore, shell completions are also available by running:
bat --completion <shell>
# see --help for supported shells
Customization
Highlighting theme
Use bat --list-themes to get a list of all available themes for syntax
highlighting. By default, bat uses Monokai Extended or Monokai Extended Light
for dark and light themes respectively. 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 bat's
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 /path/to/file"
bat automatically picks a fitting theme depending on your terminal's background color.
You can use the --theme-dark / --theme-light options or the BAT_THEME_DARK / BAT_THEME_LIGHT environment variables
to customize the themes used. This is especially useful if you frequently switch between dark and light mode.
bat has three themes that always use 8-bit colors,
even when truecolor support is available:
ansi looks decent on any terminal. It uses 3-bit colors: black, red, green,
yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white.
base16 is designed for base16 terminal themes. It uses
4-bit colors (3-bit colors plus bright variants) in accordance with the
base16 styling guidelines.
base16-256 is designed for tinted-shell.
It replaces certain bright colors with 8-bit colors from 16 to 21. Do not use this simply
because you have a 256-color terminal but are not using tinted-shell.
Although these themes are more restricted, they have three advantages over truecolor themes. They:
Enjoy maximum compatibility. Some terminal utilities do not support more than 3-bit colors.
Adapt to terminal theme changes. Even for already printed output.
Visually harmonize better with other terminal software.
Output style
You can use the --style option to control the appearance of bat's output.
You can use --style=numbers,changes, for example, to show only Git changes
and line numbers but no grid and no file header. Set the BAT_STYLE environment
variable to make these changes permanent or use bat's
configuration file.
By default, bat enables changes, grid, header-filename, numbers, and snip.
The available pre-defined styles are:
Style
Description
default
Enables the recommended style components listed above.
full
Enables all available components.
auto
Same as default, unless the output is piped.
plain
Disables all available components.
The available individual components are:
Component
Description
changes
Show Git modification markers.
header
Alias for header-filename.
header-filename
Show filenames before the content.
header-filesize
Show file sizes before the content.
grid
Vertical/horizontal lines to separate the side bar and header from the content.
rule
Horizontal lines to delimit files.
numbers
Show line numbers in the side bar.
snip
Draw separation lines between distinct line ranges.
[!tip]
If you specify a default style in bat's config file, you can change which components
are displayed during a single run of bat using the --style command-line argument.
By prefixing a component with + or -, it can be added or removed from the current style.
For example, if your config contains --style=full,-snip, you can run bat with
--style=-grid,+snip to remove the grid and add back the snip component.
Or, if you want to override the styles completely, you use --style=numbers to
only show the line numbers.
Decorations
By default, bat only shows decorations (such as line numbers, file headers, grid borders, etc.) when outputting to an interactive terminal. You can control this behavior with the --decorations option. Use --decorations=always to show decorations even when piping output to another command, or --decorations=never to disable them entirely. Possible values are auto (default), never, and always.
There is also the --force-colorization option, which is an alias for --decorations=always --color=always. This is useful if you want to keep colorization and decorations when piping bat's output to another program.
Adding new syntaxes / language definitions
Should you find that a particular syntax is not available within bat, you can follow these
instructions to easily add new syntaxes to your current bat installation.
A good resource for finding Sublime Syntax packages is Package Control. Once you found a
syntax:
Create a folder with syntax definition files:
mkdir -p "$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes"
cd "$(bat --config-dir)/syntaxes"
# Put new '.sublime-syntax' language definition files
# in this folder (or its subdirectories), for example:
git clone https://github.com/tellnobody1/sublime-purescript-syntax
Now use the following command to parse these files into a binary cache:
bat cache --build
Finally, use bat --list-languages to check if the new languages are available.
If you ever want to go back to the default settings, call:
bat cache --clear
If you think that a specific syntax should be included in bat by default, please
consider opening a "syntax request" ticket after reading the policies and
instructions here: Open Syntax Request.
Adding new themes
This works very similar to how we add new syntax definitions.
[!NOTE]
Custom themes must be stored in .tmTheme files.
Newer .sublime-color-scheme files are currently not supported.
First, create a folder with the new syntax highlighting themes:
mkdir -p "$(bat --config-dir)/themes"
cd "$(bat --config-dir)/themes"
# Download a theme in '.tmTheme' format, for example:
git clone https://github.com/greggb/sublime-snazzy
# Update the binary cache
bat cache --build
Finally, use bat --list-themes to check if the new themes are available.
[!NOTE]
bat uses the name of the .tmTheme file for the theme's name.
Adding or changing file type associations
You can add new (or change existing) file name patterns using the --map-syntax
command line option. The option takes an argument of the form pattern:syntax where
pattern is a glob pattern that is matched against the file name and
the absolute file path. The syntax part is the full name of a supported language
(use bat --list-languages for an overview).
Note: You probably want to use this option as an entry in bat's configuration file
for persistence instead of passing it on the command line as a one-off. Generally
you'd just use -l if you want to manually specify a language for a file.
Example: To use "INI" syntax highlighting for all files with a .conf file extension, use
--map-syntax='*.conf:INI'
Example: To open all files called .ignore (exact match) with the "Git Ignore" syntax, use:
--map-syntax='.ignore:Git Ignore'
Example: To open all .conf files in subfolders of /etc/apache2 with the "Apache Conf"
syntax, use (this mapping is already built in):
--map-syntax='/etc/apache2/**/*.conf:Apache Conf'
Using a different pager
bat uses the pager that is specified in the PAGER environment variable. If this variable is not
set, less is used by default. You can also use bat's built-in pager with --pager=builtin or
by setting the BAT_PAGER environment variable to "builtin".
If you want to use a different pager, you can either modify the PAGER variable or set the
BAT_PAGER environment variable to override what is specified in PAGER.
[!NOTE]
If PAGER is more or most, bat will silently use less instead to ensure support for colors.
If you want to pass command-line arguments to the pager, you can also set them via the
PAGER/BAT_PAGER variables:
export BAT_PAGER="less -RFK"
Instead of using environment variables, you can also use bat's configuration file to configure the pager (--pager option).
Using less as a pager
When using less as a pager, bat will automatically pass extra options along to less
to improve the experience. Specifically, -R/--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS, -F/--quit-if-one-screen,
-K/--quit-on-intr and under certain conditions, -X/--no-init and/or -S/--chop-long-lines.
[!IMPORTANT]
These options will not be added if:
The pager is not named less.
The --pager argument contains any command-line arguments (e.g. --pager="less -R").
The BAT_PAGER environment variable contains any command-line arguments (e.g. export BAT_PAGER="less -R")
The --quit-if-one-screen option will not be added when:
The --paging=always argument is used.
The BAT_PAGING environment is set to always.
The -R/--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS option is needed to interpret ANSI colors correctly.
The -F/--quit-if-one-screen option instructs less to exit immediately if the output size is smaller than
the vertical size of the terminal. This is convenient for small files because you do not
have to press q to quit the pager.
The -K/--quit-on-intr option instructs less to exit immediately when an interrupt signal is received.
This is useful to ensure that less quits together with bat on SIGINT.
The -X/--no-init option is added to versions of less older than version 530 (older than 558 on Windows) to
fix a bug with the -F/--quit-if-one-screen feature. Unfortunately, it also breaks mouse-wheel support in less.
If you want to enable mouse-wheel scrolling on older versions of less and do not mind losing
the quit-if-one-screen feature, you can set the pager (via --pager or BAT_PAGER) to less -R.
For less 530 or newer, it should work out of the box.
The -S/--chop-long-lines option is added when bat's -S/--chop-long-lines option is used. This tells less
to truncate any lines larger than the terminal width.
Indentation
bat expands tabs to 4 spaces by itself, not relying on the pager. To change this, simply add the
--tabs argument with the number of spaces you want to be displayed.
Note: Defining tab stops for the pager (via the --pager argument by bat, or via the LESS
environment variable for less) won't be taken into account because the pager will already get
expanded spaces instead of tabs. This behaviour is added to avoid indentation issues caused by the
sidebar. Calling bat with --tabs=0 will override it and let tabs be consumed by the pager.
Dark mode
If you make use of the dark mode feature in macOS, you might want to configure bat to use a different
theme based on the OS theme. The following snippet uses the default theme when in the dark mode
and the GitHub theme when in the light mode.
alias cat="bat --theme auto:system --theme-dark default --theme-light GitHub"
The same dark mode feature is now available in GNOME and affects the org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme setting. The following code converts the above to use said setting.
# .bashrc
sys_color_scheme_is_dark() {
condition=$(gsettings get org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme)
condition=$(echo "$condition" | tr -d "[:space:]'")
if [ $condition == "prefer-dark" ]; then
return 0
else
return 1
fi
}
bat_alias_wrapper() {
#get color scheme
sys_color_scheme_is_dark
if [[ $? -eq 0 ]]; then
# bat command with dark color scheme
bat --theme=default "$@"
else
# bat command with light color scheme
bat --theme=GitHub "$@"
fi
}
alias cat='bat_alias_wrapper'
Configuration file
bat can also be customized with a configuration file. The location of the file is dependent
on your operating system. To get the default path for your system, call
bat --config-file
Alternatively, you can use BAT_CONFIG_PATH or BAT_CONFIG_DIR environment variables to point bat
to a non-default location of the configuration file or the configuration directory respectively:
A default configuration file can be created with the --generate-config-file option.
bat --generate-config-file
There is also now a systemwide configuration file, which is located under /etc/bat/config on
Linux and Mac OS and C:\ProgramData\bat\config on windows. If the system wide configuration
file is present, the content of the user configuration will simply be appended to it.
Format
The configuration file is a simple list of command line arguments. Use bat --help to see a full list of possible options and values. In addition, you can add comments by prepending a line with the # character.
Example configuration file:
# Set the theme to "TwoDark"
--theme="TwoDark"
# Show line numbers, Git modifications and file header (but no grid)
--style="numbers,changes,header"
# Use italic text on the terminal (not supported on all terminals)
--italic-text=always
# Use C++ syntax for Arduino .ino files
--map-syntax "*.ino:C++"
Using bat on Windows
bat mostly works out-of-the-box on Windows, but a few features may need extra configuration.
Windows 10 natively supports colors in both conhost.exe (Command Prompt) and PowerShell since
v1511, as
well as in newer versions of bash. On earlier versions of Windows, you can use
Cmder, which includes ConEmu.
Note: Old versions of less do not correctly interpret colors on Windows. To fix this, you can add the optional Unix tools to your PATH when installing Git. If you don’t have any other pagers installed, you can disable paging entirely by passing --paging=never or by setting BAT_PAGER to an empty string.
Cygwin
bat on Windows does not natively support Cygwin's unix-style paths (/cygdrive/*). When passed an absolute cygwin path as an argument, bat will encounter the following error: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)
This can be solved by creating a wrapper or adding the following function to your .bash_profile file:
bat() {
local index
local args=("$@")
for index in $(seq 0 ${#args[@]}) ; do
case "${args[index]}" in
-*) continue;;
*) [ -e "${args[index]}" ] && args[index]="$(cygpath --windows "${args[index]}")";;
esac
done
command bat "${args[@]}"
}
Troubleshooting
Garbled output
If an input file contains color codes or other ANSI escape sequences or control characters, bat will have problems
performing syntax highlighting and text wrapping, and thus the output can become garbled.
If your version of bat supports the --strip-ansi=auto option, it can be used to remove such sequences
before syntax highlighting. Alternatively, you may disable both syntax highlighting and wrapping by
passing the --color=never --wrap=never options to bat.
For untrusted input, the --sanitize=auto|always|never option additionally replaces terminal-active
control bytes and Unicode bidi / zero-width formatting characters with the Unicode replacement
character. It implies --strip-ansi at the same value.
[!NOTE]
The auto option of --strip-ansi avoids removing escape sequences when the syntax is plain text.
Terminals & colors
bat handles terminals with and without truecolor support. However, the colors in most syntax
highlighting themes are not optimized for 8-bit colors. It is therefore strongly recommended
that you use a terminal with 24-bit truecolor support (terminator, konsole, iTerm2, ...),
or use one of the basic 8-bit themes designed for a restricted set of colors.
See this article for more details and a full list of
terminals with truecolor support.
Make sure that your truecolor terminal sets the COLORTERM variable to either truecolor or
24bit. Otherwise, bat will not be able to determine whether or not 24-bit escape sequences
are supported (and fall back to 8-bit colors).
Line numbers and grid are hardly visible
Please try a different theme (see bat --list-themes for a list). The OneHalfDark and
OneHalfLight themes provide grid and line colors that are brighter.
File encodings
bat natively supports UTF-8 as well as UTF-16. For every other file encoding, you may need to
convert to UTF-8 first because the encodings can typically not be auto-detected. You can iconv
to do so.
Example: if you have a PHP file in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding, you can call:
iconv -f ISO-8859-1 -t UTF-8 my-file.php | bat
Note: you might have to use the -l/--language option if the syntax can not be auto-detected
by bat.
Development
# Recursive clone to retrieve all submodules
git clone --recursive https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
# Build (debug version)
cd bat
cargo build --bins
# Run unit tests and integration tests
cargo test
# Install (release version)
cargo install --path . --locked
# Build a bat binary with modified syntaxes and themes
bash assets/create.sh
cargo install --path . --locked --force
If you want to build an application that uses bat's pretty-printing
features as a library, check out the API documentation.
Note that you have to use either regex-onig or regex-fancy as a feature
when you depend on bat as a library.
