Command is not paging by default, and the paging option is ignored

[t-scutulatus]

I just installed the bat tool and it is not paging, it just do as cat. If I use the --paging option, it is ignored.

Any ideas? Thank you.

[keith-hall]

Do you have less installed and on the PATH? Maybe running bat --diagnostics will shed some light.

[t-scutulatus]

Hi @keith-hall. That was it! I installed less and it started to page. I didn't know it was a dependency. Thank you!

[minanagehsalalma]

A common cause is that bat does not have a usable pager available, so it ends up behaving much more like cat. The first thing I would check is exactly what @keith-hall suggested: bat --diagnostics.

From the README side, the key points are:

• bat normally uses the pager from PAGER, or less by default
• if less is missing or not usable on your platform, paging can look broken
• on newer versions, you can also try the built-in pager explicitly

So I would test in this order:

bat --diagnostics
bat --paging=always --pager=builtin somefile

If --pager=builtin works but normal paging does not, that strongly suggests the external pager path is the problem. If you are on Windows, this is especially likely because a real less binary is often not installed by default. In that case, either install less or keep using the built-in pager.