The cat command (short for concatenate) is one of the most frequently used flexible commands on Linux, Apple MacOS X, *BSD (FreeBSD / OpenBSD / NetBSD), Unix-like operating systems. It is useful to display text files on screen, copy text files, combine text files, create new text files and more. If you cat command with colours, try ccat app.
More about ccat
ccat is the colorizing cat. It works similar to the cat command but displays content with syntax highlighting. It supports JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, C, and JSON programming languages. The overhead of ccat command comparing to a cat is minimum on a modern desktop with powerful multi-core CPUs and tons of RAM.
Installation
Install ccat as per your Linux/Unix distro.
Install ccat on macOS
Type the following brew command:
$ brew install ccat
Sample outputs:
==> Downloading https://homebrew.bintray.com/bottles/ccat-1.1.0.sierra.bottle.tar.gz ######################################################################## 100.0% ==> Pouring ccat-1.1.0.sierra.bottle.tar.gz ? /usr/local/Cellar/ccat/1.1.0: 4 files, 3.5MB
Install ccat on Arch Linux
Type the following command:
$ sudo pacaur -S ccat
Generic installation method for Linux/Unix users
You must have golang installed on your system. Type the following command
$ go get -u github.com/jingweno/ccat
How do I use ccat command?
The syntax is as follows:
$ ccat fileNameHere
$ ccat /etc/passwd
$ ccat file.txt foo.txt bar.txt
To output in HTML
$ ccat --html file.txt
Set dark background
$ ccat --bg=dark input.txt
Set light background:
$ ccat --bg=light input.txt
You can set color codes too:
$ ccat -G String="_darkblue_" -G Plaintext="darkred" input
To see all possible values for color codes/palette run:
$ ccat --palette
Sample outputs:
Applied color codes:
String brown
Keyword darkblue
Comment lightgrey
Type teal
Literal teal
Punctuation darkred
Plaintext darkblue
Tag blue
HTMLTag lightgreen
HTMLAttrName blue
HTMLAttrValue green
Decimal darkblue
Color code is in the format of:
color normal color
*color* bold color
_color_ underlined color
+color+ blinking color
Value of color can be black, blink, blue, bold, brown, darkblue, darkgray, darkgreen, darkred, darkteal, darkyellow, faint, fuchsia, fuscia, green, lightgray, overline, purple, red, reset, standout, teal, turquoise, underline, white, yellow
You can read input from stdin/keyboard as follows:
$ ccat
You need to press [CTRL] + [D] i.e. hold the control key down, then tap d to exit ccat session:
You can read source directly from the web too:
$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nixcraft/pf.conf/master/pf.conf | ccat
Sample outputs:
For more info see ccat project home page.
See also
2 comment
I use Pygmetize
> cat [some-file] | pygmentize -O style=monokai -g
or create a bash script called ccat
> #!/usr/bin/env bash
> pygmentize -O style=monokai -g $1
Still not available on fedora repos :/