til/unix/print-out-file-with-bat-without-formatting.md

Print Out File With Bat Without Formatting

The bat utility is my daily driver and replacement for anything used cat for before. I even have bat aliased to cat so that I never had to rewire my muscle memory for typing cat.

Whether or not the creator of cat intended it, I'd guess that most terminal users' main use case is printing the contents of a file. bat does that way better with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and some layout formatting that puts lines around the output and a heading with the filename.

All this formatting is great when I'm taking a quick look at a file. One way it gets in the way is when I'm trying to highlight and copy a few lines to my clipboard. Because the terminal is rendering lines, line numbers, and other formatting, all that fluff gets included on the clipboard.

For this scenario, I can use the -p flag (or --style=plain) to print just the (syntax-highlighted) file contents without all the extra formatting.

bat -p app/models/users.rb

# or
bat --style=plain app/models/users.rb

Another way I could have approached this was to ignore the alias of cat to bat.