Isn't bat a replacement for less, more than it is for cat?

[unfa]

Question

I've learned about bat and I love it! One thing that bothers me is the tagline and that bat is described as a clone of cat.

Surely I often use cat to print out a file and take a look at it, but I also use cat often to pipe a file through a chain of processes. Surely I could use dd, but then I have to type dd if=FILE | rather than cat FILE |.

So my usage of cat is not just to read files in the terminal.

I have also heard that the original use case for cat (and where the name comes from) was to conCATenate files, not to print them out and read. So doing cat *.xyz > concatenated.xyz would splice all the files together into one.

Bat seems to be primarly meant for reading in the console and it behaves more like less than cat in that regard.

more was intended for that purpose and less is a better version of it.

Usage of cat has changed and it is most often used to print out files than to concatenate them, but bat also adds extra characters to make the reading easier (adds a header) and features pagination (like less).

Wouldn't all that make bat more of a replacement for less?

Self-Answer

I have done some testing and found out that bat smartly disable all formatting and extra features when piping it's output to another program, making it indeed a great replacement for cat!

[keith-hall]

It's perhaps worth nothing that bat uses your default pager i.e. less under the hood, so it can't exactly be a "replacement" for the tool/pager itself (as in less still needs to be available on your machine if you want it's features), just potentially a replacement for what you choose to execute/pipe into directly.

[unfa]

Oh, that's interesting. That breaks my idea :D

[keith-hall]

There is a proposal for bat to include it's own pager, which you may be interested in: #1053