MAmalvosenior·Jul 9, 2019
Check out vimcat which is part of the vimpager project:
https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager
Basically cat with vim syntax coloring.
In Cat Colorsrkitover
vimpager
Vim Script2014–2019
rkitover / vimpager
vimpager
Use Vim as PAGER
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
794GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Use Vim as PAGER
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2014-09-08 17:37:16 UTC to 2019-07-09 15:37:09 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesI'm starting to use vimpager after realizing I don't feel good seeing 2 different coloring on the terminal and in vim, instead, this way, whatever your vim supports (color, utility, key binding) can be carried over as a pager.
The project is still rough around the edges but mostly good.
https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager
In CLI: ImprovedYou can replace colordiff with vim's less tool (/usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.sh ) or vimpager (https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager).
icdiff is also nice to have a side-by-side colored diff (https://github.com/jeffkaufman/icdiff). And of course, you could use meld, vimdiff, kompare etc. with the same bash anonymous pipes indirection.
In Requestdiff – Send two HTTP requests and visualize any differencesI'm using vimcat for this. Available as part of vimpager
https://github.com/rkitover/vimpager
In Ccat – syntax highlighting catHave you tried using the less-like script distributed with vim? The path varies depending on your distribution of vim
# ubuntu 14.04
alias less='/usr/share/vim/vim74/macros/less.sh'
# ubuntu 12.04: vim73, if I recall right
alias less='/usr/share/vim/vim73/macros/less.sh'
This behaves like `less` in many ways, and uses your syntax highlighting from vim. My only complaint is that some things with escape codes for colors are not flattened, but instead you see the escape codes. (Diffs seem to work fine, at least.) It also appears to read the whole thing into vim, which is likely not what you want for large files.
I also use the 'vimcat' script from the vimpager project [0] as well. (I'm not sure why I haven't just used the whole thing. I must not have realized there was more when I first grabbed it.)
0: https://github.com/rkitove