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Comment by awake | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if view lets you do this but bat will switch off highlighting if you are piping output `bat file.txt | grep ...`. This makes it easy to make an alias cat=bat and have everything work. Also you can make bat display output with `less` and then line numbers can be toggled, not sure about gitgutter.

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(author of bat here)

Exactly. Drop-in compatibility with 'cat' is one of the goals of bat (see https://github.com/sharkdp/bat#project-goals-and-alternative... and a list of alternatives here: https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/blob/master/doc/alternatives....).

Another thing that I use frequently is previewing a whole set of files in a single (pager) output. Something like

    bat src/*.cpp

This also allows you to easily search across a whole set of open files.

Awesome work. I've been a happy user of bat for a few months now, I've almost totally trained my brain away from typing cat.

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