Assuming perfect memory and you never make typos they are exactly the same. For most installs. Or distros. Probably.

You don't need to memorize

alias bat='f(){ cat "$1" | highlight --force -O xterm256 | less -SRNI; }; f'

For all the other issues people have pointed out, this assumes you have `highlight` installed.

As opposed to having bat installed?

> Assuming perfect memory and you never make typos they are exactly the same.

You can make an alias.

> For most installs. Or distros. Probably.

Comparing https://repology.org/project/bat-cat/packages vs https://repology.org/project/highlight/packages appears to show them with approximately equal availability. (Unless you're trying some other point, in which case I don't follow.)

I don’t know if it still uses librsync but for a long time Dropbox was based directly upon it.

Whether this proves or disproves anything in re syntax highlighting utilities I leave as an exercise.

It's a reference to this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

I know. But that doesn't make it accurate. And in broader strokes, I'm not fond of that thread/comment being used to pretend that all new and shiny things are better than what came before. Sometimes the new thing is barely more than a coat of paint on the existing thing.