bat

bat is cat with syntax highlighting, line numbers, and git integration. It makes reading files in the terminal actually pleasant instead of squinting at monochrome text. Written in Rust, fast enough that you won't notice it's doing extra work.

Plain cat is universal but featureless. less is the pager alternative for longer files. highlight and pygmentize add syntax coloring but with more friction. There's no commercial equivalent because this is a terminal utility, not a product.

Replace cat with bat in your shell aliases and never look back. It auto-detects file types, shows git changes in the margin, and pipes cleanly to other tools. Apache 2.0 licensed.

The catch: it's slightly slower than cat on huge files (hundreds of MB) because it's actually parsing the content. If you're piping binary data or giant logs, use cat. Also, the default theme might not match your terminal colors — you'll want to run bat --list-themes and pick one that works with your setup.