Cat is just a tool to dump files to stdout and maybe concatenate them. If you want paging, syntax highlighting, etc, you probably want a tool to replace `less`, not `cat`.
Isn't "view" just an alias to invoke vim on read-only mode (i.e. you can still edit the text, do anything else you can do on vim and then save the contents to another file instead of the original file)?
Cat is just a tool to dump files to stdout and maybe concatenate them. If you want paging, syntax highlighting, etc, you probably want a tool to replace `less`, not `cat`.