Install bat with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• bat

Project history

bat's first GitHub release, v0.1.0, was published on April 22, 2018 as an initial release. The project describes itself as a cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration, and its README states goals of advanced highlighting, Git integration, POSIX-cat replacement behavior, and a friendlier command-line interface.

The tool has stayed in the familiar Unix-filter shape rather than becoming an editor. Its README documents both pretty terminal output and fallback behavior for non-interactive output, where bat acts as a drop-in cat-style concatenator.

By the v0.25.0 release, bat was still adding practical terminal features such as squeeze-blank support, ANSI stripping, shell completions, theme behavior, and broader syntax handling, showing a mature utility polishing edge cases rather than changing identity.

Adoption history

bat became one of the canonical modern Rust CLI replacements, helped by packaging across Homebrew, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch, Alpine, Nix, MacPorts, Chocolatey, Scoop, winget, and other systems listed in the input metadata and upstream README.

The README notes that Ubuntu has carried bat since 20.04 and Debian since Bullseye, with older Debian-family releases installing the executable as batcat because of a package-name clash. That rename became part of bat's package-manager lore.

The repository's GitHub page showed roughly 59.5k stars and 43 releases at enrichment time, making bat far more than a niche wrapper.

How it is used

bat is commonly used directly as `bat FILE`, as a pager-backed file viewer, as a syntax-colored stdin renderer, as a git-aware diff context viewer, and as a cat replacement when invoked in non-interactive pipelines.

The README documents integrations with fzf previews, find or fd, ripgrep through batgrep, tail -f log viewing, git show, git diff helpers, and clipboard workflows where plain output matters.

Why package nerds care

bat is significant because it helped define the 2010s/2020s style of polished Rust command-line utilities: familiar Unix nouns, fast single binaries, colorful defaults, Git awareness, good package-manager coverage, and careful degradation in pipes.

For package nerds, it is also a naming and policy specimen. The Debian/Ubuntu batcat period shows how a simple binary name can collide with existing packages, forcing downstream-visible aliases and workarounds even for a very popular tool.

It matters culturally because many later CLI packages pitch themselves in the same grammar: a small classic Unix command, rebuilt with syntax awareness, colors, Git context, and modern ergonomics.

Timeline

• 2018: v0.1.0 initial release published on GitHub.
• 2020: README documents availability in Ubuntu 20.04 and later.
• 2021: README documents availability in Debian 11 Bullseye and later.
• 2025: v0.25.0 release adds polish such as squeeze-blank, ANSI-stripping, shell completions, and theme behavior.
• 2025: Repository page lists v0.26.1 as the latest release on December 2, 2025.

Related projects

• bat-extras builds helper scripts around bat for ripgrep, man pages, diffs, and other terminal workflows.
• delta is called out by bat's README as a related tool for richer git and diff support.
• fd, fzf, ripgrep, git, less, and tail are common tools bat is documented to integrate with.

Sources

• https://github.com/sharkdp/bat
• https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/releases/tag/v0.1.0
• https://github.com/sharkdp/bat/releases/tag/v0.25.0
• source_facts.package-manager