Alternatives

The following table tries to give an overview from bats perspective, i.e. we only compare categories which are relevant for bat. Some of these projects have completely different goals and if you are not looking for a program like bat, this comparison might not be for you.

	bat	pygments	highlight	ccat	source-highlight	hicat	coderay	rouge	clp
Drop-in `cat` replacement	:heavy_check_mark: *	:x:	:x:	(✔️)	:x:	:x: *	:x:	:x:	:x:
Git integration	:heavy_check_mark:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:
Automatic paging	:heavy_check_mark:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:	:x:	:x:	:x:
Languages (circa)	150	300	200	7	80	130	30	130	150
Extensible (languages, themes)	:heavy_check_mark:	(✔️)	(✔️)	:x:	(✔️)	:x:	:x:	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:
Advanced highlighting (e.g. nested syntaxes)	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	(✔️) ?	:x:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:	:heavy_check_mark:
Execution time [ms] (`jquery-3.3.1.js`)	422	455	299	39	208	287	128	740	22
Execution time [ms] (`miniz.c`)	27	169	19	4	36	131	58	231	4
Execution time [ms] (957 kB XML file)	215	296	236	165	83	412	135	386	127

If you think that some entries in this table are outdated or wrong, please open a ticket or pull request.

Some other alternatives that are also related, but not yet included in the table:

Benchmarks

The benchmarks above have been created with this script:

bash

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" || exit

if ! command -v hyperfine > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "'hyperfine' does not seem to be installed."
    echo "You can get it here: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine"
    exit 1
fi

SRC="test-src/jquery-3.3.1.js"


cmd_bat="bat --style=full --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_bat_simple="bat --plain --wrap=never --tabs=0 --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_pygmentize="pygmentize -g '$SRC'"
cmd_highlight="highlight -O truecolor '$SRC'"
cmd_ccat="ccat --color=always '$SRC'"
cmd_source_highlight="source-highlight --failsafe --infer-lang -f esc -i '$SRC'"
cmd_hicat="hicat '$SRC'"
cmd_coderay="coderay '$SRC'"
cmd_rouge="rougify '$SRC'"
cmd_clp="clp '$SRC'"

hyperfine --warmup 3 \
    "$cmd_bat" \
    "$cmd_bat_simple" \
    "$cmd_pygmentize" \
    "$cmd_highlight" \
    "$cmd_ccat" \
    "$cmd_source_highlight" \
    "$cmd_hicat" \
    "$cmd_coderay" \
    "$cmd_rouge" \
    "$cmd_clp" \