Colour the cat!

cat is a command I use all the time to view the content of text files.

If you’ve never used cat, open a terminal with SUPER + ENTER and try it on your Bash config:

cat ~/.bashrc

For a distro like Omarchy, which puts a strong emphasis on aesthetics, this plain black-and-white output is a bit disappointing.

Let’s fix that.

Omarchy ships with a cat replacement named bat. Its motto is “a cat clone with wings”. It includes syntax highlighting, Git integration, and pagination.

Try it on the same file:

bat ~/.bashrc

Now you get colours, line numbers, and pagination. Nice!

We could just use bat instead of cat and call it a day. But cat is widely used, muscle memory is real, and the original command still has value for simple output.

Fortunately, bat has an option to keep the colours without the line numbers or pagination. Let’s add an alias to our .bashrc so cat uses bat by default:

alias cat='bat -pp'~/.bashrc

The -pp option is a shortcut for --style=plain --paging=never. It removes the decorations, like headers and row numbers, and makes the output flow continuously just like the normal cat command.

Reload your .bashrc after making the change:

source ~/.bashrc

Next, configure bat to use the current Omarchy theme colours. Create ~/.config/bat/config with this content:

--theme="base16"~/.config/bat/config

This tells bat which syntax-highlighting theme to use. The base16 theme is built around a small 16-colour palette, so it fits neatly with Omarchy’s theme system instead of bringing in a totally different colour scheme.

Now try cat ~/.bashrc again. You should get a nicely coloured output while keeping the familiar cat command.

Credits to @dwaynebradley for posting this tip in the Omarchy GitHub discussions.