Thin line number

[KaspianDev]

Hey, is it possible to remove spaces before and after numbers to make it more thin?

[sharkdp]

Partially. You can remove the changes style option (see help text for --style) which makes up one character:

bat --style=grid,snip,numbers,header …

You can also add

--style=grid,snip,numbers,header

to bats config file to make this permanent. But note that it will interfere with style-auto-detection, e.g. when piping the output to another process or a file.

The problem is the following: bat does not (and can not) know in advance how many lines an input might have. Imagine a scenario like some_program | bat where the input comes from a pipe. In order to be a (mostly) POSIX-compliant alternative to cat, we need to output the incoming text in a streaming kind of way. This is necessary if some_program produces output very slowly, for example. But it also means that we cannot simply read all the input first and then start writing the output. Which is why we need to reserve some space in the left sidebar for potentially large line numbers.