To be 100% fair, Bat only acts this way when used in an interactive environment. As far as I know, in non-interactive cases (a la shell scripting) it falls back to normal cat behaviour
> Whenever bat detects a non-interactive terminal (i.e. when you pipe into another process or into a file), bat will act as a drop-in replacement for cat and fall back to printing the plain file contents
which was good enough for me personally, but I also have seen anecdotal evidence of people running `alias cat=bat` with a bunch of your usual bash piping work without any issues
