Syntax highlighting/colorizing cat

Question

Is there a method to colorize the output of cat, the way grep does.

For grep, in most consoles it displays a colored output hi

Answer 1

From late April 2018 onwards:

Bat - A cat(1) clone with syntax highlighting and Git integration.

The project is a cat clone with support for colors and customizations written in Rust. It offers not only syntax highlighting with multiple themes, but also Git integration. As described in the documentation:

bat tries to achieve the following goals:

• Provide beautiful, advanced syntax highlighting
• Integrate with Git to show file modifications
• Be a drop-in replacement for (POSIX) cat
• Offer a user-friendly command-line interface

It is, needless to say, much faster than pygmentize and does not choke when confronted with large files.

Source code and binary releases + installation instructions can be found in the Github repository, as well as a comparison to alternative programs.