ccat

ccat is a file printing tool (like 'cat') which uses Regular Expressions to enable syntax highlighting.

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Features

• 11 colors are defined out-of-the-box: RED, BLUE, GREEN, MAGENTA, CYAN, BLACK, WHITE, YELLOW, GRAY, ORANGE and DARKBLUE.
• Support for defining custom colors via the ccat.colors file.
• Regex-color mappings are stored in configuration files.
• Uses the file extension to determine which configuration file to use.
• Highly extensible - to add a config file for an specific file type, name the file <extension>.conf.
• Support for printing line numbers with the -n flag.
• Statically linked Go binary - no runtime dependencies, config files are distributed along with the binary.
• Linux and MacOS supported.

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Installing

Download the appropriate zip-file from the 'Releases' section. Place the executable in your PATH.

NOTE: The releases are not available on the GitHub repo (which is a mirror of https://gitea.twomorecents.org/Rockingcool/ccat). Obtain the releases from there instead.

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Building from source

If you have the go command installed, run make after cloning the repository.

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Supported Languages

The following languages have config files included by default:

• C
• Go

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Getting Started

The config files are embedded within the binary. They will automatically be installed to the correct location (~/.config/ccat on UNIX) when the program is first run.

As written above, if provided a file with extension .example, the program will look for the config file named example.conf. If such a file doesn't exist, the file is printed out without any highlighting.

For example, if you want to create syntax highlighting for Java, create a file named java.conf in your config directory. In this file, include regular-expressions for each of the langauges's keywords, and provide a corresponding color. Use the provided c.conf and go.conf files as a starting point.

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Config Files

The config files are written in YAML. Each line has the following syntax:

"<regex>": COLOR

Note that the regex must be enclosed in double quotes, and the color must be capitalized.

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Custom Colors

To define a color of your own, create a file named ccat.colors in the config directory (mentioned above). The syntax of this file is the following:

COLOR: <red> <green> <blue>

Note that the color name must be capitalized (and shouldn't contain spaces). The RGB values must each be from 0 to 255.

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TODO:

• Windows support.
• Allow users to provide a config file in the command-line, overriding the extension-based config file.
• Provide releases.