Workaround: export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"

Those ^H characters are usually a sign that man is emitting old-school backspace overstrike formatting and it is reaching bat before being cleaned up. In other words, this is often more about the man/groff output path than about bat's highlighting itself.

The standard fix is to normalize the manpage stream before bat sees it:

export MANPAGER="sh -c 'col -bx | bat -l man -p'"

Why this helps:

• col -bx removes the backspace-overstrike sequences that show up as ^H
• bat -l man -p keeps the manpage syntax and plain layout

So I would not immediately file this as a bat bug if the raw MANPAGER="bat -plman" path is the only failing case. I would first test with col -bx. If it still reproduces on current bat after that, then it becomes a much stronger bug report.

I had this issue too! For me it was a TERM variable mismatch. Try export TERM=xterm-256color before using bat as MANPAGER. Also check if you have any LESS_TERMCAP_* variables set — they can interfere.

Btw, I built a small analysis tool for GitHub repos that shows contributor patterns — might be interesting to see bat's contributor distribution: https://gitscope-micro.vercel.app/api/report/sharkdp/bat