Hmm. Interesting!

I wondered if there's a way to leverage emacs's understanding of file formats to do this for all the formats that emacs can understand, and apparently there is:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24329865/using-emacs-in-batch-mode-to-dump-a-file-with-syntax-highlighting

https://github.com/Lindydancer/e2ansi

Cool cool, now just need to wire it up to every common command and make a custom best-effort fallback so I never have to think about it (except for when it inexplicably breaks in 6 months and I need to fix it again).

Gonna get down voted to hell for this, but it's my main gripe with daily driving Linux: to get a semblance of QoL you either monkey patch a brittle solution or dedicate your finite time and memory to learning the song and dance of each tool.

I know it's not fair to gripe about freely supported open source software, but dev tooling has advanced an incredible amount since the old hackathon days. We need better efforts around modular integration and UX to really get widespread adoption.

If you enjoy bat, may I also recommend you try:

• eza as an alternative to ls
• zoxide as an alternative to cd
• fd as an alternative to find
• fzf paired with fd for enhanced reverse searching and more
• delta for syntax highlighting pager for git, diff, grep, blame output

I’ve been using these for probably around 5-10 years / daily, without issue.

This is a great video. I always appreciate a deeper look into tools like this.