Comment by ikurei

Although I agree with other commenters that your command can't compare to all of bat's features, many of which I appreciate... thank you for sharing this tip, I didn't know about `highlight` and I can't install `bat` at work.

This will live in my .bashrc for a long time:

    cat() {
      if [[ -t 1 ]]; then
        command cat "$@" | highlight --force -O xterm256
      else
        # plain cat to pipe into other things
        command cat "$@"
      fi
    }