bat

bat is a cat replacement with built-in syntax highlighting. It makes reading files in the terminal a lot more pleasant, especially for config files, YAML, JSON, and code.

Install

• Install bat

$ dnf install -y bat

On some distros the binary is called batcat. Add an alias if needed: alias bat=batcat

Usage

• Display a file with syntax highlighting

$ bat file.yaml

• Pipe output into it (specify language explicitly when piping)

$ kubectl get cm my-config -o yaml | bat -l yaml

Configure

By default bat shows line numbers, a file header and borders. Use --style=plain to get clean output without decorations.

• Add an alias to ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc

alias bat='bat --style=plain'

• Reload your shell config

$ source ~/.bashrc

To make less automatically use bat for syntax highlighting, add this to your shell config as well:

export LESSOPEN="|bat --color=always --style=plain %s"
export LESS="-R"

After this, opening any file with less file.yaml will automatically show it with colors.