Unix – Syntax highlighting/colorizing cat

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Is there a method to colorize the output of cat, the way grep does.

For grep, in most consoles it displays a colored output highlighting the searched keywords. Otherwise, you can force it by calling grep --color
Is there a generic way to color the output of any program according to your personal choice.

From what I understand, the program itself is not responsible for the colors. It is the shell.

I am using the default shell in FreeBSD 5.2.1 which looks like it has never seen colors since epoch.

Best Answer

I'd recommend pygmentize from the python package python-pygments. You may want to define the following handy alias (unless you use ccat from the ccrypt package).

alias ccat='pygmentize -g'

Syntax highlighted cat output using pygmentize

And if you want line numbers:

alias ccat='pygmentize -g -O style=colorful,linenos=1'

Related Solutions

Unix – Use grep –exclude/–include syntax to not grep through certain files

Use the shell globbing syntax:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.cpp --include=\*.h rootdir

The syntax for --exclude is identical.

Note that the star is escaped with a backslash to prevent it from being expanded by the shell (quoting it, such as --include="*.cpp", would work just as well). Otherwise, if you had any files in the current working directory that matched the pattern, the command line would expand to something like grep pattern -r --include=foo.cpp --include=bar.cpp rootdir, which would only search files named foo.cpp and bar.cpp, which is quite likely not what you wanted.

Update 2021-03-04

I've edited the original answer to remove the use of brace expansion, which is a feature provided by several shells such as Bash and zsh to simplify patterns like this; but note that brace expansion is not POSIX shell-compliant.

The original example was:

grep pattern -r --include=\*.{cpp,h} rootdir

to search through all .cpp and .h files rooted in the directory rootdir.

How to customise file type to syntax associations in Sublime Text

In Sublime Text (confirmed in both v2.x and v3.x) there is a menu command:

View -> Syntax -> Open all with current extension as ...

Best Answer

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Unix – Use grep –exclude/–include syntax to not grep through certain files

How to customise file type to syntax associations in Sublime Text

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