Did you ever feel the need to display the content of some file, may be a Java or HTML, on the terminal? Yes, you are right. For this purpose, we use cat command that comes bundled with every Linux distribution.

But you know what, the output is plain boring! What if you wanted to display the content of the file in the same way as you have opened it inside any text editor, may be vim.

There is a well known Python program known as Pygments. This program provides syntax highlighting support and has now become the de-facto standard. To install Pygments, we would need a third party program that manages software which is written in Python. This program is Pip.

Let’s install and configure Pip and Pygments.

Pip is most probably already installed if you have Python 2 (>= 2.7.9) or Python 3 (>= 3.4) installed on your machine, which is the case on any modern Linux distribution. If this is not the case, then I recommend to upgrade your Python installation or else follow along if you don’t want to upgrade your python installation.

Please not, the following procedure may leave your system in an inconsistent state if your Python installation is managed by your system (e.g., dnf, apt-get, etc).

Download the Pip installer script from https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py, and execute with the command python get-pip.py¹.

Now, as we have our Pip installation working which we can check by executing the command pip --version, lets install Pygments, which is as easy as if you execute the command pip install Pygments¹. This would install a program /usr/bin/pygmentize, which we can use along with -g switch, that would auto-detect the lexer of the file and print the file content in the correct highlighting scheme. Following is an example:

  pygmentize -g card_layout.cpp

Instead of writing this lengthy command we could alias it by writing a line alias kat="pygmentize -g" inside our .bashrc file. Now our previous example would also work by executing following command:

  kat card_layout.cpp

I don’t know what are your opinions on it, but I personally prefer my kat alias instead of cat command to output the file content. For a note for the kat alias, we can’t display the line numbers as the cat command does by utilizing its -n switch.

Thanks for reading till here. See you next time.