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

source-highlight

Maybe it's possible to find interesting source-highlight released under GNU: a package different from highlight.

Excerpt from apt-cache show source-highlight:

Description-en: convert source code to syntax highlighted document.
This program, given a source file, produces a document with syntax highlighting.
It supports syntax highlighting for over 100 file formats ...
For output, the following formats are supported: HTML, XHTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, ANSI color escape sequences, and DocBook

I did some alias (Cat and PCat, see below) and this is their output

You can install on Debian based with

sudo apt-get install source-highlight

and add it as alias e.g. in your .bash_aliases with something like the line below.

alias Cat='source-highlight --out-format=esc -o STDOUT -i'  
Cat myfile.c # or myfile.xml ...

Or you can do a similar alias (without the -iat the end to have the possibility to pipe in)

alias PCat='source-highlight --out-format=esc -o STDOUT '
tail myfile.sh | PCat     # Note the absence of the `-i`

Among the options that it's possible to read from man source-highlight the -s underlines that is possible to select, or force, the highlighting by command line or to leave to the program this duty:

-s, --src-lang=STRING source language (use --lang-list to get the complete list). If not specified, the source language will be guessed from the file extension.

--lang-list list all the supported language and associated language definition file