Not the GP and I do like bat, but to answer your questions:
> That shows non-printable characters like bat does?
cat does actually support that via the flags with -v (you can also use -t and -e to view tab and line endings too)
> That allows you to concatenate and page multiple files at once like bat does?
cat is literally called “cat” because it’s intended purpose is concatenation.
It’s not a pager though the GPs example did pipe to less anyway.
> That supports the --line-range option like bat does?
‘tail’ and ‘head’ would be muscle memory to a lot of people and not that different in terms of number of keystrokes.
But I do take your point that it’s nice to have that built into your pager.
> You can pipe the output of tail -f through your alias?
I couldn’t see why not. tail -f isn’t doing anything weird with the fd.
———
I’m not arguing against using bat though. I have it aliased to cat on my own machines, so I clearly and would recommend bat. But I do think some people might be surprised how far you can get with coreutils if bat wasn’t available
> That shows non-printable characters like bat does?
cat does actually support that via the flags with -v (you can also use -t and -e to view tab and line endings too)
> That allows you to concatenate and page multiple files at once like bat does?
cat is literally called “cat” because it’s intended purpose is concatenation.
It’s not a pager though the GPs example did pipe to less anyway.
> That supports the --line-range option like bat does?
‘tail’ and ‘head’ would be muscle memory to a lot of people and not that different in terms of number of keystrokes.
But I do take your point that it’s nice to have that built into your pager.
> You can pipe the output of tail -f through your alias?
I couldn’t see why not. tail -f isn’t doing anything weird with the fd.
———
I’m not arguing against using bat though. I have it aliased to cat on my own machines, so I clearly and would recommend bat. But I do think some people might be surprised how far you can get with coreutils if bat wasn’t available