How to Install and Use ccat for Colorized cat Output on Linux

Why ccat?

Traditional cat streams file contents without syntax highlighting, making source code hard to read. ccat is a drop‑in replacement that adds colourised output for many languages (JavaScript, Java, Ruby, Python, Go, C, JSON, etc.).

Installation

Arch Linux (AUR)

Install from the AUR with an AUR helper, e.g.:

yay -S ccat

Other Linux distributions (manual)

Download the release archive:

wget https://github.com/jingweno/ccat/releases/download/v1.1.0/linux-amd64-1.1.0.tar.gz

Extract the archive: tar xfz linux-amd64-1.1.0.tar.gz Copy the executable to a directory in $PATH (e.g. /usr/local/bin): sudo cp linux-amd64-1.1.0/ccat /usr/local/bin/ Make it executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/ccat

Basic usage

Display a single file with colour: ccat hello.c Display multiple files: ccat test.txt example.txt Output HTML instead of terminal colours: ccat test.txt --html Pipe remote files directly:

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jingweno/ccat/master/main.go | ccat

Show the default colour palette: ccat --palette Define custom colours (example):

ccat -G String="_fuchsia_" -G Plaintext="darkteal" hello.c

Replacing the system cat

Create an alias to use ccat as the default cat command: alias cat=ccat Add the alias to ~/.bashrc (or system‑wide files such as /etc/bashrc or /etc/profile) and reload the shell:

source ~/.bashrc

Troubleshooting

If the download fails with an OpenSSL/TLS error, update the local OpenSSL and Git packages to support newer TLS versions.

Visual comparison

Standard cat output (no colours):

ccat

output (coloured):