Bat is a replacement for Cat with a slew of impressive features. The image above is a tiny example of its beauty printing out a file (a readme in this case).

Install on Mac:

brew install bat

My zsh function which kicks in when its available in $PATH to replace cat:

if which bat >/dev/null 2>&1; then alias cat='bat --theme=DarkNeon --style="numbers,changes,header,grid"'; fi

This sets a better theme and explicitly defines the features I want.

More at https://github.com/sharkdp/bat

….Yeah, I know. Where has this been all our lives.

Mario Loria is a builder of diverse infrastructure with modern workloads on both bare-metal and cloud platforms. He's traversed roles in system administration, network engineering, and DevOps. You can learn more about him here.