Provide useful output when bat is given a directory instead of a file

[jasonkarns]

It's pretty common (for me) to run bat thing when thing is a directory. It's usually because I want to see what's in thing but (initially) I may not know it's a directory.

Since bat's purpose (in my words) is to be a more useful cat, I think it would be helpful to print more useful output when given –accidentally or otherwise– a directory. My initial suggestion would be to print the directory's contents as if via ls.

Granted, it still should be considered an error to invoke either cat and therefore also bat with a directory. So I would still consider the exit code to be 1; and it should continue to print [bat error]: 'thing' is a directory.

But bat could emit a file listing to STDOUT (or STDERR) along with the existing error message.

Thoughts?

[Enselic]

Personally I would consider this to be out-of-scope for bat.

It would be easy to write a wrapper script that invokes ls if the argument is a dir and bat if the argument is a file. With some trickery you can even call that script bat and have it on your PATH.

[sharkdp]

This has been requested before and I previously had a similar reply like @Enselic. On the other hand, I do have to admit that it also happens to me from time to time 😄. Maybe we could indeed print a simple directory listing. Similar to what vim <directory> shows, but without any of the controls. We could also call out to ls, but that comes with a lot of portability concerns (I do have some experience from fd --list-details).

But I'm also okay with closing this as "won't do". It's not really in the scope of bat.

[Enselic]

This has indeed been requested before. I could easily find three examples that have been closed: #1156, #971, #427.

Let's keep this one open then and see what happens :)

[keith-hall]

The tool mentioned at #800 (comment) also can provide this functionality.

[sharkdp]

Potential solution: #2203

[kohane27]

I was having this exact issue and thanks to @keith-hall for linking to the awesome program rsop created by @desbma. Thank you to you two awesome people!

Here's my little guide for using rsop along with fzf.

In the fzf preview window, if it's a directory, it'll use lsd to preview the directory; if it's a file, it'll use bat to preview the file.

1. Install rsop
2. Copy config.toml.advanced to ~/.config/rsop/config.toml:

curl -o ~/.config/rsop/config.toml https://raw.githubusercontent.com/desbma/rsop/master/config/config.toml.advanced

4. Use rsop in fzf like this: fzf --preview='rsp {}'
5. Cheers!