On Ubuntu (using most recent .deb packages)  packages)')" title="Copy section prompt for LLMs"> Copy Section

... and other Debian-based Linux distributions.
If the package has not yet been promoted to your Ubuntu/Debian installation, or you want
the most recent release of bat, download the latest .deb package from the
release page and install it via:

On Alpine Linux  Copy Section
You can install the bat package
from the official sources, provided you have the appropriate repository enabled:

On Arch Linux  Copy Section
You can install the bat package
from the official sources:

On Fedora  Copy Section
You can install the bat package from the official Fedora Modular repository.

On Gentoo Linux  Copy Section
You can install the bat package
from the official sources:

On FreeBSD  Copy Section
You can install a precompiled bat package with pkg:

or build it on your own from the FreeBSD ports:

On OpenBSD  Copy Section
You can install bat package using pkg_add(1):

Via nix  Copy Section
You can install bat using the nix package manager:

On openSUSE  Copy Section
You can install bat with zypper:

Via snap package  Copy Section
There is currently no recommended snap package available.
Existing packages may be available, but are not officially supported and may contain issues.
On macOS (or Linux) via Homebrew  Copy Section
You can install bat with Homebrew:

On macOS via MacPorts  Copy Section
Or install bat with MacPorts:

On Windows  Copy Section
There are a few options to install bat on Windows. Once you have installed bat,
take a look at the "Using bat on Windows" section.
#### Prerequisites
You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable
#### With WinGet
You can install bat via WinGet:

#### With Chocolatey
You can install bat via Chocolatey:

#### With Scoop
You can install bat via scoop:

#### From prebuilt binaries:
You can download prebuilt binaries from the Release page,
You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.
From binaries  Copy Section
Check out the Release page for
prebuilt versions of bat for many different architectures. Statically-linked
binaries are also available: look for archives with musl in the file name.
From source  Copy Section
If you want to build bat from source, you need Rust 1.79.0 or
higher. You can then use cargo to build everything:
#### From local source

NOTE
The --path . above specifies the directory of the source code and NOT where bat will be installed.

For more information see the docs for cargo install.
#### From crates.io

Note that additional files like the man page or shell completion
files can not be installed automatically in both these ways.
If installing from a local source, they will be generated by cargo
and should be available in the cargo target folder under build.
Furthermore, shell completions are also available by running:

Customization  Copy Chapter
Highlighting theme  Copy Section
Use bat --list-themes to get a list of all available themes for syntax
highlighting. By default, bat uses Monokai Extended or Monokai Extended Light
for dark and light themes respectively. To select the TwoDark theme, call bat
with the --theme=TwoDark option or set the BAT_THEME environment variable to
TwoDark. Use export BAT_THEME="TwoDark" in your shell's startup file to
make the change permanent. Alternatively, use bat's
configuration file.
If you want to preview the different themes on a custom file, you can use
the following command (you need fzf for this):

bat automatically picks a fitting theme depending on your terminal's background color.
You can use the --theme-dark / --theme-light options or the BAT_THEME_DARK / BAT_THEME_LIGHT environment variables
to customize the themes used. This is especially useful if you frequently switch between dark and light mode.
You can also use a custom theme by following the
'Adding new themes' section below.
8-bit themes  Copy Section
bat has three themes that always use 8-bit colors,
even when truecolor support is available:
- ansi looks decent on any terminal. It uses 3-bit colors: black, red, green,
  yellow, blue, magenta, cyan, and white.
- base16 is designed for base16 terminal themes. It uses
  4-bit colors (3-bit colors plus bright variants) in accordance with the
  base16 styling guidelines.
- base16-256 is designed for tinted-shell.
  It replaces certain bright colors with 8-bit colors from 16 to 21. Do not use this simply
  because you have a 256-color terminal but are not using tinted-shell.
Although these themes are more restricted, they have three advantages over truecolor themes. They:
- Enjoy maximum compatibility. Some terminal utilities do not support more than 3-bit colors.
- Adapt to terminal theme changes. Even for already printed output.
- Visually harmonize better with other terminal software.
Output style  Copy Section
You can use the --style option to control the appearance of bat's output.
You can use --style=numbers,changes, for example, to show only Git changes
and line numbers but no grid and no file header. Set the BAT_STYLE environment
variable to make these changes permanent or use bat's
configuration file.
>[!tip]
If you specify a default style in bat's config file, you can change which components

are displayed during a single run of bat using the --style command-line argument.

By prefixing a component with + or -, it can be added or removed from the current style.

> For example, if your config contains --style=full,-snip, you can run bat with

--style=-grid,+snip to remove the grid and add back the snip component.

Or, if you want to override the styles completely, you use --style=numbers to

only show the line numbers.
Decorations  Copy Section
By default, bat only shows decorations (such as line numbers, file headers, grid borders, etc.) when outputting to an interactive terminal. You can control this behavior with the --decorations option. Use --decorations=always to show decorations even when piping output to another command, or --decorations=never to disable them entirely. Possible values are auto (default), never, and always.
There is also the --force-colorization option, which is an alias for --decorations=always --color=always. This is useful if you want to keep colorization and decorations when piping bat's output to another program.
Adding new syntaxes / language definitions  Copy Section
Should you find that a particular syntax is not available within bat, you can follow these
instructions to easily add new syntaxes to your current bat installation.
bat uses the excellent syntect
library for syntax highlighting. syntect can read any
Sublime Text .sublime-syntax file
and theme.
A good resource for finding Sublime Syntax packages is Package Control. Once you found a
syntax:
1. Create a folder with syntax definition files:

2. Now use the following command to parse these files into a binary cache:

3. Finally, use bat --list-languages to check if the new languages are available.
   If you ever want to go back to the default settings, call:

4. If you think that a specific syntax should be included in bat by default, please
   consider opening a "syntax request" ticket after reading the policies and
   instructions here: Open Syntax Request.
Adding new themes  Copy Section
This works very similar to how we add new syntax definitions.
NOTE
Custom themes must be stored in .tmTheme files.

Newer .sublime-color-scheme files are currently not supported.
First, create a folder with the new syntax highlighting themes:

Finally, use bat --list-themes to check if the new themes are available.
NOTE
bat uses the name of the .tmTheme file for the theme's name. 
Adding or changing file type associations  Copy Section
You can add new (or change existing) file name patterns using the --map-syntax
command line option. The option takes an argument of the form pattern:syntax where
pattern is a glob pattern that is matched against the file name and
the absolute file path. The syntax part is the full name of a supported language
(use bat --list-languages for an overview).
Note: You probably want to use this option as an entry in bat's configuration file
for persistence instead of passing it on the command line as a one-off. Generally
you'd just use -l if you want to manually specify a language for a file.
Example: To use "INI" syntax highlighting for all files with a .conf file extension, use

Example: To open all files called .ignore (exact match) with the "Git Ignore" syntax, use:

Example: To open all .conf files in subfolders of /etc/apache2 with the "Apache Conf"
syntax, use (this mapping is already built in):

Using a different pager  Copy Section
bat uses the pager that is specified in the PAGER environment variable. If this variable is not
set, less is used by default. You can also use bat's built-in pager with --pager=builtin or
by setting the BAT_PAGER environment variable to "builtin".
If you want to use a different pager, you can either modify the PAGER variable or set the
BAT_PAGER environment variable to override what is specified in PAGER.
>[!NOTE]
If PAGER is more or most, bat will silently use less instead to ensure support for colors.
If you want to pass command-line arguments to the pager, you can also set them via the
PAGER/BAT_PAGER variables:

Instead of using environment variables, you can also use bat's configuration file to configure the pager (--pager option).

Using less as a pager  as a pager')" title="Copy section prompt for LLMs"> Copy Section
When using less as a pager, bat will automatically pass extra options along to less
to improve the experience. Specifically, -R/--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS, -F/--quit-if-one-screen,
-K/--quit-on-intr and under certain conditions, -X/--no-init and/or -S/--chop-long-lines.
>[!IMPORTANT]
These options will not be added if:

- The pager is not named less.

- The --pager argument contains any command-line arguments (e.g. --pager="less -R").

- The BAT_PAGER environment variable contains any command-line arguments (e.g. export BAT_PAGER="less -R")

> The --quit-if-one-screen option will not be added when:

- The --paging=always argument is used.

- The BAT_PAGING environment is set to always.
The -R/--RAW-CONTROL-CHARS option is needed to interpret ANSI colors correctly.
The -F/--quit-if-one-screen option instructs less to exit immediately if the output size is smaller than
the vertical size of the terminal. This is convenient for small files because you do not
have to press q to quit the pager.
The -K/--quit-on-intr option instructs less to exit immediately when an interrupt signal is received.
This is useful to ensure that less quits together with bat on SIGINT.
The -X/--no-init option is added to versions of less older than version 530 (older than 558 on Windows) to
fix a bug with the -F/--quit-if-one-screen feature. Unfortunately, it also breaks mouse-wheel support in less.
If you want to enable mouse-wheel scrolling on older versions of less and do not mind losing
the quit-if-one-screen feature, you can set the pager (via --pager or BAT_PAGER) to less -R.
For less 530 or newer, it should work out of the box.
The -S/--chop-long-lines option is added when bat's -S/--chop-long-lines option is used. This tells less
to truncate any lines larger than the terminal width.
Indentation  Copy Section
bat expands tabs to 4 spaces by itself, not relying on the pager. To change this, simply add the
--tabs argument with the number of spaces you want to be displayed.
Note: Defining tab stops for the pager (via the --pager argument by bat, or via the LESS
environment variable for less) won't be taken into account because the pager will already get
expanded spaces instead of tabs. This behaviour is added to avoid indentation issues caused by the
sidebar. Calling bat with --tabs=0 will override it and let tabs be consumed by the pager.
Dark mode  Copy Section
If you make use of the dark mode feature in macOS, you might want to configure bat to use a different
theme based on the OS theme. The following snippet uses the default theme when in the _dark mode_
and the GitHub theme when in the _light mode_.

The same dark mode feature is now available in GNOME and affects the org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme setting. The following code converts the above to use said setting.

Configuration file  Copy Chapter
bat can also be customized with a configuration file. The location of the file is dependent
on your operating system. To get the default path for your system, call

Alternatively, you can use BAT_CONFIG_PATH or BAT_CONFIG_DIR environment variables to point bat
to a non-default location of the configuration file or the configuration directory respectively:

A default configuration file can be created with the --generate-config-file option.

There is also now a systemwide configuration file, which is located under /etc/bat/config on
Linux and Mac OS and C:\ProgramData\bat\config on windows. If the system wide configuration
file is present, the content of the user configuration will simply be appended to it.
Format  Copy Section
The configuration file is a simple list of command line arguments. Use bat --help to see a full list of possible options and values. In addition, you can add comments by prepending a line with the # character.
Example configuration file:

Using bat on Windows  on Windows')" title="Copy chapter prompt for LLMs"> Copy Chapter
bat mostly works out-of-the-box on Windows, but a few features may need extra configuration.
Prerequisites  Copy Section
You will need to install the Visual C++ Redistributable package.
Paging  Copy Section
Windows only includes a very limited pager in the form of more. You can download a Windows binary
for less from its homepage or through
Chocolatey. To use it, place the binary in a directory in
your PATH or define an environment variable. The Chocolatey package installs less automatically.
Colors  Copy Section
Windows 10 natively supports colors in both conhost.exe (Command Prompt) and PowerShell since
v1511), as
well as in newer versions of bash. On earlier versions of Windows, you can use
Cmder, which includes ConEmu.
Note: Old versions of less do not correctly interpret colors on Windows. To fix this, you can add the optional Unix tools to your PATH when installing Git. If you don’t have any other pagers installed, you can disable paging entirely by passing --paging=never or by setting BAT_PAGER to an empty string.
Cygwin  Copy Section
bat on Windows does not natively support Cygwin's unix-style paths (/cygdrive/*). When passed an absolute cygwin path as an argument, bat will encounter the following error: The system cannot find the path specified. (os error 3)
This can be solved by creating a wrapper or adding the following function to your .bash_profile file:

Troubleshooting  Copy Chapter
Garbled output  Copy Section
If an input file contains color codes or other ANSI escape sequences or control characters, bat will have problems
performing syntax highlighting and text wrapping, and thus the output can become garbled.
If your version of bat supports the --strip-ansi=auto option, it can be used to remove such sequences
before syntax highlighting. Alternatively, you may disable both syntax highlighting and wrapping by
passing the --color=never --wrap=never options to bat.
NOTE
The auto option of --strip-ansi avoids removing escape sequences when the syntax is plain text.
Terminals & colors  Copy Section
bat handles terminals with and without truecolor support. However, the colors in most syntax
highlighting themes are not optimized for 8-bit colors. It is therefore strongly recommended
that you use a terminal with 24-bit truecolor support (terminator, konsole, iTerm2, ...),
or use one of the basic 8-bit themes designed for a restricted set of colors.
See this article for more details and a full list of
terminals with truecolor support.
Make sure that your truecolor terminal sets the COLORTERM variable to either truecolor or
24bit. Otherwise, bat will not be able to determine whether or not 24-bit escape sequences
are supported (and fall back to 8-bit colors).
Line numbers and grid are hardly visible  Copy Section
Please try a different theme (see bat --list-themes for a list). The OneHalfDark and
OneHalfLight themes provide grid and line colors that are brighter.
File encodings  Copy Section
bat natively supports UTF-8 as well as UTF-16. For every other file encoding, you may need to
convert to UTF-8 first because the encodings can typically not be auto-detected. You can iconv
to do so.
Example: if you have a PHP file in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) encoding, you can call:

Note: you might have to use the -l/--language option if the syntax can not be auto-detected
by bat.
Development  Copy Chapter