any way to remove leading space added to each line when the style is plain?

[ChuckFoo]

I was checking out bat to use for syntax highlighting for less (or potentially to replace less for me) and I noticed that despite telling it to use the plain style, no decorations, just do syntax highlighting, that it still inserts a space at the beginning of each line...is there any way to make it NOT do that?

If using it like "cat" I see that it doesn't do that, so feels like it should be possible and maybe I'm just missing something...

Thanks.

[vynazevedo]

You can keep syntax highlighting with decorations and paging disabled:

bat --no-config --style=plain --color=always --paging=never file.py

I checked bat 0.26.1 with forced color and plain style: after removing the ANSI color sequences, the output had no extra leading spaces. So plain style itself doesn't require a one-column margin.

If the command above removes the space on your machine, check the pager separately. In particular, less -J / --status-column reserves a column on the left. That can come from LESS, BAT_PAGER, or PAGER, independently of bat's style. For a clean comparison in a POSIX shell:

LESS= bat --no-config --style=plain --color=always \
  --paging=always --pager='less -R' file.py

That's a diagnostic possibility, not something I can confirm from the description alone. If the space remains even with --paging=never, the exact command, bat version, and a tiny input example would help distinguish configuration from a rendering issue.

The pager documentation explains the separate pager settings.

[fotedev]

The decisive test is --paging=never plus a byte-level look. plain itself adds no margin - if the space disappears below, it comes from the pager, not bat:

bat --no-config --style=plain --color=never --paging=never file.py | cat -A | head

If lines start immediately with no leading space before the $ line-end markers, bat is clean and the column is added downstream. The classic culprit is less -J / --status-column, which reserves a left column and can sneak in via LESS, BAT_PAGER, or PAGER independently of bat's style. Check with:

echo "LESS=$LESS BAT_PAGER=$BAT_PAGER PAGER=$PAGER"
LESS= bat --no-config --style=plain --color=always --paging=always --pager='less -R' file.py

If the space survives even --paging=never, post the exact command, bat --version, and a minimal input sample - then it is a rendering issue worth an issue report rather than config.

[ChuckFoo]

Finally circled back to this and not sure what I was doing differently previously as I thought it was more or less the way you guys described above, but testing today w/ what you both suggested in my LESSOPEN indeed the space is gone...

Not sure what the difference in what I was attempting previously and the above is, because for some reason I didn't put the LESSOPEN I was trying in my question here, didn't make a note of it or save it off anywhere either, and my history merging seems to have discarded it too, but it's definitely working more like expected now. 🤪

Thanks!