Why bat does the pipes its output to less?

[aljustiet]

I checked in htop that bat pipes the output of it to the less, Why?

[einfachIrgendwer0815]

Bat reads a file, determines its file type and performs syntax highlighting, line highlighting, adds line numbers, shows modification markers, wraps the content according to the terminal width, etc. In most cases, a file has more lines than the height of the terminal, so bat's output will also be too long to fit on a single terminal screen. Therefore, bat pipes its output to less, which is a pager. So less is what provides the scrolling functionality.

Which pager bat uses can be changed using the cli option --pager and paging behaviour, i.e. how bat decides whether to page or not, can be changed using --paging.