Make it possible to do alias cat=hicat

[sshaw]

Just came across this and the first thing I thought was that I can maybe (finally) use a seamless alias for cat. Unfortunately, after a hicat --help, I realized this is not possible as cat -n == hicat -N.

IMHO supporting cat's options would make this a lot more useful, filling the void where other "cat replacements" (highlight, src-highlite, pygmentize, etc...) fall a bit short.

Most of cat's (small set of) options are not taken up by hicat. I think that -n and -e are the most popular.

Thoughts?

[rstacruz]

this sounds like a terrible idea and will break things that scripts that rely on cat. nonetheless, -n seems like something that should come by default.

[sshaw]

this sounds like a terrible idea and will break things that scripts that rely on

Actually the idea is to not break things. Hence this issue.

[rstacruz]

Actually the idea is to not break things. Hence this issue.

Even something like cat *.css > combined.css? ;-)

[rstacruz]

hmm, now that i think about it, that's actually kinda possible if we check process.stdout.isaTTY() and behave like a normal cat if it's true...

[sshaw]

Actually the idea is to not break things. Hence this issue.

Even something like cat *.css > combined.css? ;-)
...
hmm, now that i think about it, that's actually kinda possible if we check process.stdout.isaTTY()

Heh yeah, figured this was implied. grep, ls, etc... have a --color options that's turned off then output is a TTY.

[sshaw]

Though now that I think about maybe I really need a version of less with syntax highlighting. Or, a less filter that uses this -or the others I mentioned- to do so.

[rstacruz]

Oh, I remember the design decision as to why it's -N and not -n. This is consistent with less -N, which hicat more closely resembles.

Hicat pages using less by default by the way: doing hicat longfile.txt will let you scroll through it using less.