I've also aliased cat to bat but it causes me issues when I redirect the output of cat (bat) without \cat to a file as then the file contains color codes that are not expected by other users and tools and cause some tools to not behave correctly,while the issue is invisible to me (unless reading the generated file with \cat)
bat should not be doing that. It should perform exactly like cat when piped or redirected. At least it does for me, even if the text is colorized in a tty. Perhaps an issue with your pager settings? Dunno.
