Not too sure about the colors yet, but the random characters where the grid separator should be looks like a unicode decoding issue.

A couple questions:

Does your font support unicode characters?

Is your pager less, and if so, what version is it?

Are you using Git Bash/MSYS2/Cygwin, or the native Windows environment?

What happens if you use --paging=never?

Yes, my font supports Unicode characters. I'm using Starship and lsd which print out things using Nerd Fonts.

I'm unsure what my pager is. I don't have $env:PAGER set to anything, and I'm not sure that Windows would honor that anyway.

I'm using a native Windows environment, running Powershell 7.0.3. I notice this isn't the latest version, so I'll upgrade to Powershell 7.1.0 to see if that fixes things at all. Edit: Powershell 7.1.0 doesn't change things.

If I use --paging=never it works:

It appears as though bat has found less.exe version 436 in my path, and is using that. If I remove less, then things look as expected:

I've removed the MinGW install, since I'm not sure where it came from. As a result, this is no longer an issue for me. You may close this Issue if you feel it is resolved.

However, it may still be considered a problem that the presence of less.exe in the PATH can cause incorrect output, so this perhaps can still be considered an issue.

Thanks for figuring this out and posting the explanation here.

We could test for very old versions of less (11 years old) and potentially skip them or print an error (on Windows). We already check the version of less, so that would be an easy fix.

To be fair, this isn't the first time I've been bitten by random things in the PATH on Windows. Strange and bizarre things happen if sh.exe is there and you try to use make, for example.

There appeared to be a check already, but it wasn't getting triggered. I agree that it's a good first issue.