What is it? It says it is a cat clone, but what is cat?
The classic file viewer for a terminal is cat (or less).
Bat is a file viewer in every sense. I have concatenated multiple files using bat. It does come in handy sometimes. But even the concatenated output is designed to be a visual aid, not the traditional concatenation that cat does.
> 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
which was good enough for me personally, but I also have seen anecdotal evidence of people running `alias cat=bat` with a bunch of your usual bash piping work without any issues
Example: If you're navigating to the folder of a git repository in your terminal and quickly want to see what the readme says without having to open a file manager or going to the website on github/gitlab/codeberg you can run:
cat README.md
bat does essentially the same, only fancier, with syntax highlighting, some formatting and colors.
Concatenate FILE(s) to standard output.
With no FILE, or when FILE is -, read standard input
Cat in 99% of the usage cases is used on one file
It does have the effect of what you describe if one file is supplied and might be the most common use case. That doesn't make your description correct, at best it makes it incomplete.