bat
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 17 of 86 privilege escalation tools by recommenders
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.
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.
22 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 19
- criticize it
- 3
- approval share
- 86%
Recommended in 9 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 19 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 6.3 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 9 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Cat replacement with syntax highlighting
“another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI” “If you want better syntax highlighting you could setup bat[0] as your difftool.”
Comment from 6 Jan 2026 in “Stop Doom Scrolling, Start Doom Coding: Build via the terminal from your phone” “paru shows you coloured code syntax if you have `bat` installed”
Comment from 12 Jun 2026 in “AUR Packages Compromised with Infostealer and Rootkit” - Comment from 1 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?”
Automatic pager built in
“another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.”
Comment from 14 Mar 2026 in “Emacs and Vim in the Age of AI” “bat is the king of pagers”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “I made a terminal pager” Lightweight with no dependencies
“From my daily-use utilities, ripgrep and bat seem to have zero dependencies.”
Comment from 23 Dec 2025 in “Fabrice Bellard Releases MicroQuickJS” “Lightest weight: bat and ripgrep”
Comment from 5 Jul 2026 in “Ask HN: Good fast IDE for reading and navigating code in multiple languages” Covers most needs
“Works great for most of my tools”
Comment from 2 Jan 2026 in “Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin” “it covers most of what I need”
Comment from 16 Apr 2026 in “I made a terminal pager”
Other privilege escalation tools people recommend
The four most recommended other privilege escalation tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 86 privilege escalation tools, rankedWhat people said
19 of the 23 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“Lightest weight: bat and ripgrep”
“none could compete with theBat!”
“paru shows you coloured code syntax if you have `bat` installed”
“BAT as a monetization alternative to advertising is one of the few practical applications of crypto”
“I tried it and it doesn't work for me, sadly.”
“And it deliberately breaks less’ handling of ^C, annoyingly.”
“Personally I can't find any use for bat”
“it covers most of what I need”
“it's always a lot slower when first opening really large files”
“bat is the king of pagers”
“nice coloured cat replacement”
“another thing I use a lot is bat, which is cat with syntax highlighting and an automatic pager.”
“I have BAT installed for a reason”
“I like the results better than glow, bat and a few other viewers.”
“If you want better syntax highlighting you could setup bat[0] as your difftool.”
“Works great for most of my tools”
“From my daily-use utilities, ripgrep and bat seem to have zero dependencies.”
“a good way to not only grab a bunch of useful programs like exa and bat”
“I have bat, eza, etc aliased to things like cat and ls”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.