Today, while checking some old scripts laying around my home directories I found myself “cat-ing” a ton of them. cat is mighty useful, but It could really use a colored output.

I found a small Python program called Pygmentize, which is nothing more than a syntax highlighter that supports a lot of programming languages and file formats.

If you’re on Linux and using apt you can find the package by the name of python-pygments.

Once installed, I just added a simple entry to my bash_aliases file:

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alias ccat='pygmentize -g'

From monochrome to fabulous.