# bat

19 Hacker News commenters recommended bat and 3 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 9 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free command-line cat replacement with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager that people find covers most needs. Critics say it is slow to open very large files.

## Why people recommend it

- Cat replacement with syntax highlighting (4 comments): "another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47374032)) "If you want better syntax highlighting you could setup bat[0] as your difftool." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518058)) "paru shows you coloured code syntax if you have `bat` installed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48507593))
- Automatic pager built in (2 comments): "another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47374032)) "bat is the king of pagers" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47787513))
- Lightweight with no dependencies (2 comments): "From my daily-use utilities, ripgrep and bat seem to have zero dependencies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46369752)) "Lightest weight: bat and ripgrep" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48797044))
- Covers most needs (2 comments): "Works great for most of my tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46463677)) "it covers most of what I need" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47788488))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [fzf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fzf.md): 78 recommend
- [jq](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jq.md): 75 recommend
- [grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grep.md): 65 recommend
- [Atuin](https://hackerapproved.com/p/atuin.md): 63 recommend
- [GitHub CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-cli.md): 49 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "bat", https://hackerapproved.com/p/bat/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).