bat/doc/alternatives.md

6.9 KiB

Alternatives

The following table tries to give an overview from bats perspective, i.e. we only compare categories which are relevant for bat. Some of these projects have completely different goals and if you are not looking for a program like bat, this comparison might not be for you.

bat pygments highlight ccat source-highlight hicat coderay rouge
Drop-in cat replacement ✔️ * (✔️) *
Git integration ✔️
Automatic paging ✔️ ✔️
Languages (circa) 150 300 200 7 80 130 30 130
Extensible (languages, themes) ✔️ (✔️) (✔️) (✔️)
Advanced highlighting (e.g. nested syntaxes) ✔️ ✔️ (✔️) ? ✔️ ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Execution time [ms] (jquery-3.3.1.js) 624 789 400 80 300 316 157 695
Execution time [ms] (miniz.c) 66 656 26 8 53 141 75 254
Execution time [ms] (370 kB XML file) 238 487 129 111 110 339 147 359

If you think that some entries in this table are outdated or wrong, please open a ticket or pull request.

Some other alternatives that are also related, but not yet included in the table:

Benchmarks

The benchmarks above have been created with this script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")" || exit

if ! command -v hyperfine > /dev/null 2>&1; then
    echo "'hyperfine' does not seem to be installed."
    echo "You can get it here: https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine"
    exit 1
fi

SRC="test-src/jquery-3.3.1.js"


cmd_bat="bat --style=full --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_bat_simple="bat --plain --wrap=never --tabs=0 --color=always --paging=never '$SRC'"
cmd_pygmentize="pygmentize -g '$SRC'"
cmd_highlight="highlight -O truecolor '$SRC'"
cmd_ccat="ccat --color=always '$SRC'"
cmd_source_highlight="source-highlight --failsafe --infer-lang -f esc -i '$SRC'"
cmd_hicat="hicat '$SRC'"
cmd_coderay="coderay '$SRC'"
cmd_rouge="rougify '$SRC'"

hyperfine --warmup 3 \
    "$cmd_bat" \
    "$cmd_bat_simple" \
    "$cmd_pygmentize" \
    "$cmd_highlight" \
    "$cmd_ccat" \
    "$cmd_source_highlight" \
    "$cmd_hicat" \
    "$cmd_coderay" \
    "$cmd_rouge" \