Faster than bat cli, with better theming. (written in swift, powered by tree-sitter, btw)
Themes: UtilityDark (default), Catppuccin Frappé, Vim Adwaita Dark, Tokyo Night, built-in --light.
A cat alternative for macOS and Linux that prints files to your terminal with syntax highlighting — backgrounds, line numbers, and gutter included. Auto-pages with less. Starts up in ~5ms, so it's great piped into previewers like fzf, tv, and yazi.
# dog responds instantly when you call them
dog Sources/dog/Dog.swift
# dog can brighten up your day
dog --light src/lib.rs
# You can pass dog a bone
echo 'struct Point { let x, y: Int }' | dog -l swift
# dog remembers your favorite theme
dog --set-default-theme 'Nord Dark'
# dog plays well with other pets
fzf --preview 'dog --color=always --theme "Catppuccin Mocha" {}'A yazi plugin wraps dog as a previewer with caching and theme config.
- 800+ Zed themes — drop a JSON file in, or point
--theme-dirat your existing~/.config/zed/themesand use what you already have. Backgrounds, line numbers, and gutter are all theme-controlled, opacity included. Two zero-cost built-ins ship too — dark is the default,--lightflips to the bright one. Any theme can be saved as your default — stored precomputed, so it loads as fast as the built-ins. - Up to 14.6× faster than bat on large files — 54k lines of TypeScript in 0.4s vs 5.8s. 100% syntax coverage across all 17 supported languages.
- ~5ms startup, every language — precompiled highlight queries mean there's no per-language warmup. In fzf or yazi, that's the latency on every keystroke.
- Single binary, no runtime deps — 17 grammars statically compiled in. Copy it anywhere, it runs.
- Built on tree-sitter — full AST parse, not regex. Highlight queries from nvim-treesitter.
- Written in Swift — direct tree-sitter C API. Custom ANSI renderer, custom zero-copy JSON parser (sub-millisecond theme loads).
| Language | Speed vs bat, large files |
|---|---|
| Bash | 6.1× |
| C | 5.8× |
| C++ | 7.7× |
| CSS | 6.4× |
| Go | 6.7× |
| HTML | 1.7× |
| JavaScript | 10.1× |
| JSON | 9.1× |
| Lua | 5.2× |
| Markdown | 7.7× |
| Python | 6.1× |
| Ruby | 5.2× |
| Rust | 6.8× |
| Swift | 5.3× |
| TSX | 11.9× |
| TypeScript | 14.6× |
| YAML | 9.5× |
HTML's ratio looks tight because its "large" benchmark file is only ~2,400 lines — it benchmarks like a medium file. Full matrix in the benchmarks.
Tip
The language is auto-detected from the file extension, filename, or shebang — force one with -l <language>. dog --list-languages prints the names to use.
Install script — picks the right build for your machine, installs it, and sets up shell completions:
curl -fsSL https://sh.dog/install | shHomebrew:
brew tap edden27/dog
brew trust edden27/dog
brew install dogBinary — four builds: dog-macos-arm64, dog-macos-x86_64, dog-linux-x86_64, dog-linux-arm64. Grab yours:
curl -L https://github.com/edden27/dog/releases/latest/download/dog-macos-arm64.tar.gz | tar xz
sudo mv dog /usr/local/bin/From source — needs Swift 6.3 or newer (Xcode 26 on macOS):
git clone https://github.com/edden27/dog
cd dog
make build && make installmake install copies the binary into /usr/local/bin, asking for sudo only when it has to; make install PREFIX=~/.local avoids sudo entirely. Only need a few languages? dog can compile a subset — a Swift+JSON-only build is ~5 MB instead of ~20. See custom builds.
Requires macOS 14+ or Linux with the Swift runtime (bundled in the Linux binary).
Tab completions — dog generates its own completion script for bash, zsh, and fish (dog --generate-completion-script zsh); the docs walk through the one-time install for your shell.
Left: dog in 1.1s, right: bat in 6.9s — printing the same 260,493-line C file.
| dog | bat | |
|---|---|---|
| Engine | tree-sitter, full AST | regex per line |
| Themes | Zed JSON, 800+ available | TextMate XML |
| Bold & italic fonts (all 4 styles) | Theme-controlled | Partial — italics opt-in, never combined |
| Line background, gutter, line-number colors | Theme-controlled | Fixed |
| Languages | 17 | 200+ |
| Syntax coverage (avg) | 100% | 77% |
| Multi-file, git gutter, Windows | Not yet | Yes |
| Binary size | ~20 MB (macOS) | ~5 MB |
Full benchmarks and methodology in the docs.
- Getting started — install, your first highlight, changing themes, and dog as a file previewer
- Installation — every install method, plus no-sudo installs and custom language builds
- Configuration — every flag, env var, exit code
- How to integrate dog — recipes for fzf, tv, and yazi previews, tab completions, and advanced commands for pagers, pipes, and stdin
- Theming — setting a default theme, using existing Zed themes, finding themes, creating your own themes, full token list
- Benchmarks — full speed and coverage matrix, the methods behind the numbers, and how to run them yourself
- How is dog different? — how dog is built, what that changes for themes, coverage, and speed, and when to use which
0.1.0 — first public release. dog is stable at 0.1 but still a puppy: we don't anticipate breaking changes, but it is in active development. Known limitations:
- Single file at a time (multi-file planned)
- No git-diff gutter
- No Windows
--range,--header, and--no-line-numbersare stubs$PAGERnot honored (pager is hardcoded toless -R)
Most likely next — no promises, no order: line ranges, line highlighting, headers/footers, TOML config, more languages, alternative pagers, git integration, man + --help highlighting. See What's next.
Test suite: 222 Swift unit tests across 31 suites + 51 integration assertions across 9 suites + 13 bat-compatibility scenarios.
- Highlight queries from nvim-treesitter (Apache 2.0)
- Tree-sitter grammars from the upstream tree-sitter community
- Theme format from Zed
- Terminal recordings made with vhs by Charm
Tip
🐕 Dog Fact — Dogs love dark mode. They have superior night vision and motion detection, which was more important evolutionarily than color vision for their survival as hunters.
MIT — see LICENSE.