SuperCat 🐱

cat you see!? It's a fancy super cat! 🐱

SuperCat is a syntax highlighting alternative to the traditional cat command-line utility. It provides colorful and easy-to-read output for various programming languages and file types, powered by tree-sitter and the Helix editor's syntax highlighting engine.

Features

• Syntax highlighting for multiple programming languages using tree-sitter
• Automatic language detection based on file extension or content
• Option to display line numbers
• Customizable color theme
• Support for reading from files or standard input
• Powered by the Helix editor's syntax highlighting engine

Why SuperCat?

SuperCat offers advantages over similar tools:

1. Advanced syntax highlighting: SuperCat uses tree-sitter through the Helix editor's syntax highlighting engine. This provides more accurate and context-aware parsing compared to regex-based highlighters, resulting in better highlighting for complex language constructs. It also benefits from Helix's performance optimizations and support for a wide range of languages.

2. Lightweight: SuperCat is designed to be a lightweight alternative, focusing on fast startup times and efficient memory usage.

3. Customizability(soon): The color theme in SuperCat is easily customizable, allowing users to tailor the output to their preferences.

Installation

You can install SuperCat using Cargo, the Rust package manager:

cargo install supercat

Alternatively, you can build from source:

git clone https://github.com/guilhermeprokisch/supercat.git
cd supercat
cargo build --release

The built binary will be available in target/release/supercat.

Usage

supercat [OPTIONS] [FILE]

If no file is specified, SuperCat will read from standard input.

Options

• -l, --line-numbers: Show line numbers
• --language <LANGUAGE>: Force a specific language for syntax highlighting

Examples

1. Display a file with syntax highlighting:

   supercat example.rs
   

2. Display a file with line numbers:

   supercat -l example.py
   

3. Force a specific language:

   supercat --language javascript example.txt
   

4. Read from standard input:

   echo "print('Hello, World!')" | supercat --language python
   

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

• tree-sitter for robust syntax parsing
• Helix
• inkjet for integrating the Helix highlighting engine