> bat it's a useless cat. Cat concatenates files. ANSI colour breaks that.
It's useless as a cat replacement, I agree. The article really shouldn't call it that, although the program's GitHub page does self-describe it as "a cat clone". It's more of a syntax highlighter combined with a git diff viewer (I do have an issue with that; it should be two separate programs, not one).
I have two uses for 'cat':
1) Piping the contents of some file into a process.
2) Showing the contents of some short file.
Now (1) is better done with redirection (< or >). The only time I use cat is when I'm testing some pipeline where I only want a few lines of input, so I use 'head' or something similar. Once I have the pipeline working right, I edit the command line to replace 'head' with 'cat'. Easier than re-arranging whole words.
And it's rare that (2) is the right solution--too often I find that the file was longer than I thought, and I have to use 'more' (actually 'less').
So a replacement for 'cat' that does color coding sounds pretty much useless to me.
Right, don't think of it as a cat replacement, think of it as a coloriser. If you never want a coloriser, fair enough, ignore bat! But I find it quite nice when I'm reading through source code or Markdown.