bat

Bat is an useful tool for viewing plain text files in the terminal.

Reference

The official repository can be found here. This repository serves as a easy-to-do tutorial for setting up bat.

Installation

Windows

Install Visual C++ Redistributable first.

Then there are many package managers that can be used to install bat on Windows, such as scoop, chocolatey, winget, etc.
At the same time, installation via binary files is also supported. See Release.

Scoop

scoop install bat
scoop install less

Chocolatey

choco install bat

Winget

winget install sharkdp.bat
winget install JohnTaylor.less
winget install JohnTaylor.lesskey

macOS (with brew or MacPorts)

brew install bat

port install bat

Linux

Ubuntu and other Debian-based Linux distributions (with apt)

sudo apt install bat

If you install bat this way, please note that the executable may be installed as batcat instead of bat (due to a name clash with another package). 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:

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin
ln -s /usr/bin/batcat ~/.local/bin/bat

Bat can also be installed using .deb files, see official repository for more information.

Alpine Linux

sudo apk add bat

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -S bat

Other distributions please refer to the official repository.

Configuration

The configuration file's location can be called using bat --config-file. A default configuration file can be generated using bat --generate-config-file.

Run bat --help to see all the available options.

For Windows users, some features need extra configuration. See official repository if errors occur.

Sample

This repo contains sample config file for bat.

git clone https://github.com/Hydraallen/bat.git ~/.config/bat

Usage

Display a single file on the terminal

bat filename

Show non-printable characters

You can use the -A/--show-all option to show and highlight non-printable characters.

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