It's a similar idea to that, but it's more lightweight and much more of a "drop-in replacement" for both cat and less. For instance, when using it as a replacem

It's a similar idea to that, but it's more lightweight and much more of a "drop-in replacement" for both cat and less. For instance, when using it as a replacement for "less", it will use terminal colors correctly (i.e. "ls --color | bat" works like you'd want), it will have the same keybindings as less (i.e. b/f for page back/forward, / for search, q for quit, ...), it wont have a cursor, etc. Essentially "less and cat but way better". Vim can certainly do all these things (or mostly, I don't know about the terminal colors), but for viewing read-only text streams, it's a bit more domain-specific and convenient. It's also blazing fast to open, which vim isn't always.