BATMAN(1)

💅 BATMAN(1)

Ok so bestie, listen — this is batman, from the General Commands Manual section, and it's about to change your whole terminal aesthetic. 🦋

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✨ NAME ✨

batman — read system manual pages (man) but make it serve, using bat as the manual page formatter. Slay.

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🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

Gone are the days of losing your place while reading through monotone manual pages. Literally gone. With bat and batman, you can read man ifconfig with beautiful 24-bit color and syntax higlighting. (Yes, that's how the original spells it — "higlighting" — I'm not touching it, it's iconic. 💅)

And if you have fzf installed? You can even use batman to search through manual pages! The way that just works? Obsessed. 😭

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🌸 USAGE 🌸

batman [SECTION] [ENTRY]

💖 As a Replacement for Man

With bash:

eval "$(batman --export-env)"

With fish:

batman --export-env | source

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🌈 ENVIRONMENT 🌈

• MANPAGER — Changes the pager used for batman. This is treated like BAT_PAGER, but only affects this command. Lowkey the polite way to do it, ngl. ✨

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🧚 CUSTOMIZATION 🧚

👑 Changing the Theme

You can change the syntax highlighting theme for batman by setting the BAT_THEME environment variable before calling batman. The following wrapper function will change the theme to Solarized (dark) without affecting any other bat command. Bestie behavior fr fr — it minds its own business. 🫶

batman() {
    BAT_THEME="Solarized (dark)" batman "$@"
    return $?
}

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🔥 CAVEATS 🔥

Flags aren't highlighted. Yeah. I know. 😭 Here's the whole situation:

• This happens when you change bat's theme through bat's config file or the BAT_THEME environment variable. Not all themes provide colours for flags, and it's a known issue.
• You can overriding the theme for batman by wrapping it in a function that sets BAT_THEME. (Their words, not mine — "overriding" and all. 💀)
• The following themes support manpage highlighting:
  • Monokai Extended / Monokai Extended Light
  • Solarized (dark) / Solarized (light)

So like… if your flags are looking flat and sad, it's not you, it's the theme. Check this list before you spiral. 🫶

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💜 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 💜

Thanks to @sharkdp and @LunarLambda for debugging how to make this work properly in certain environments. Real ones. 🙏

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✨ that's the whole page, bestie ✨ — this was BATMAN(1) out of the General Commands Manual, and you absolutely ate that read. Go read something in 24-bit color now. 💖🎀