Colorizing Output from the cat Command

I have a special function called pcat, which stands for “pretty catenate”, saved in my dotfiles repository on github. I really wish this style of cat would be the default on modern machines.

Here it is, sans link:

function pcat() {
  pygmentize -f terminal256 -O style=native -g $1 | less;
}
alias cat=pcat

I’ve omitted the part where you get pip installed on your machine first, and install the pygments module for colorizing output based on a detected language. This is required.

Here’s an example of what the output looks like on my machine:

$> cat src/openstack/identity.clj

Even though it seems like overkill (you could just as easily open the file in your editor), it’s small, unobtrusive, and strangely, not the default.