Tool Bat

tool-bat

When To Use

• Preview file contents with line numbers and syntax highlighting.
• Show focused line ranges during debugging and review.
• Improve readability of piped terminal output.

Trusted Commands

bat file.py
bat --plain file.py
bat -r 10:40 file.py
bat -l json file.txt
command | bat -l json
bat --paging=never file.py

Safe Defaults

• Use --paging=never in scripts and non-interactive runs.
• Use --plain when colored decorations would break parsing.
• Fallback to batcat where distro packaging uses that binary name.

Common Pitfalls

• Forgetting pager behavior in automation contexts.
• Treating bat output as machine-parseable by default.
• Assuming bat exists where only batcat is installed.

Output Interpretation

• Default output includes line numbers and style metadata.
• --plain minimizes formatting for simple text workflows.

Why It Matters For Agents

• Rapidly improves human readability of code and config output.
• Language forcing (-l) keeps piped content understandable.

Repo Conventions

• Use bat for visual inspection, not search operations.
• Keep examples aligned with WSL aliasing (bat -> batcat).

Trigger Examples

• Should trigger: "Show this config file with line numbers and syntax color."
• Should trigger: "Preview a script quickly before editing it."
• Should not trigger: "Find every occurrence of ValidationError in the repo."