How can I display syntax highlighting on a file?

Question

Is there a variant of cat that outputs syntax-highlighted lines of code when used on a source file?

An idea: maybe vi[m] or another editor can be asked to dump the syntax-highlighted contents of said files to stdout and exit immediately?

Answer 1

Passing the file through pygmentize-f terminal will attempt to detect the type from the filename and highlight it appropriately.

Answer 2

The Source-highlight package is shipped with the esc.outlang output language definition, which highlights with ANSI escape sequences.

A handy wrapper src-hilite-lesspipe.sh is also included in the package, so displaying highlighted output in the terminal is just src-hilite-lesspipe.sh source.file.

Actually src-hilite-lesspipe.sh's primary reason is to help automating the use of source-highlight with less. You just set:

export LESSOPEN="| /path/to/src-hilite-lesspipe.sh %s"
export LESS=' -R '

Then any less source.file will show highlighted source code. (Code in unknown language will pass through unaltered. Highlighting will be also skipped in case of redirected content, like less < source.file.)