c

catfish, or c, is a better cat for your fish.

It puts files through syntax highlighting, and intelligently pipes to a pager (less) if the file is quite long (1.5x the height of your terminal); it simply displays to standard output otherwise.

It's useful for quickly looking at code.

Installation

You need to be using the fish shell. Copy c.fish to ~/.config/fish/functions/ and it should work for you. You also need Pygments for the syntax highlighting: pip install pygments.

Usage

c file1 [file2...]

Options

-p, --pager, --less: Force the usage of less, instead of outputting inline, even if the files are short
-i, --inline : Force outputting to standard output and don't pipe to less, even if the files are long
-l, --line-numbers : Force showing line numbers
-n, --no-line-numbers : Disable line numbers
-h, --help : Display this help

To do

This was quickly hacked together, but still needs to be made more robust.

• Doesn't handle multiple files very well when using less (it goes through them one by one)
• The automatic line number algorithm isn't actually implemented
• It should use the user-defined pager, instead of less
• Slightly better error handling