[HN Gopher] Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer
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Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer
Hey, Hacker News! Today I'm proud to release jless, a command-line
JSON viewer. jless provides a JSON viewing experience similar to
what you see in a browser's network tab in the developer console,
but from the comfort of your terminal, with a whole suite of vim-
inspired key bindings to easily manipulate your view of the data
and full-text regex search. I'm sure many of you have some piped
together some combination of cat, jq and less before; hopefully
jless can replace that usage (hence the name). It supports newline
delimited JSON too, so it can handle any output from jq. I built
jless to solve a problem I kept facing while building
plaintextsports.com [1][2]. For the live data I use a lot of
public, but undocumented APIs, and I was constantly digging through
giant JSON files to understand how the data was structured. I tried
installing multiple Chrome extensions, but was dissatisfied with
all of them. I piped files through jq into less a lot, and that was
ok, but not great. The Preview pane in the Network tab of Chrome's
dev tools was pretty useful, and I modeled a lot of jless's
behavior and appearance off of that, but it didn't fit well into my
tmux + vim dev environment, and I couldn't easily use it to inspect
files on disk. I wanted that experience, but in my terminal (and
with search support). Once I had built a rudimentary version of
jless a few months ago, I immediately started using it whenever I
was debugging something, and my usage has only grown as I've added
more basic functionality. I've finally added all the features I
feel like it needs to be functional, useful, and reliable. There's
definitely more features I want to add: Windows support, some way
to filter data with jq filters (a la fx [3]), yanking objects to
the clipboard, being able to hide keys entirely, streaming data in,
so you can peek at the start of gigantic file, maybe a way to
extract a schema from a file (like [4]), plenty of low-hanging
fruit for performance. Support for different hierarchical data
formats (YAML, TOML, XML) could be cool someday. I'm sure many
people will ask for editing support, but sadly that is not
something I plan on adding anytime soon. I also used this project
as a chance to learn Rust (code style and design comments
appreciated!), which I had only dabbled with before. For a command-
line utility, this felt like an obvious choice: small binaries
(~3mb), instant startup, and great performance without any effort
(try searching for comma in a big file!). I hope you find it
useful! [1]: https://plaintextsports.com, live sports scores in
plain text, no ads, no tracking, no loading [2]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26310314 [3]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861043 [4]:
https://quicktype.io/typescript
Author : CodeIsTheEnd
Score : 34 points
Date : 2022-02-09 15:41 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (pauljuliusmartinez.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (pauljuliusmartinez.github.io)
| alexmorse wrote:
| This is great, especially for when I'm trying to digest a big
| blob where I don't know exactly what the structure is already!
| mcmm wrote:
| Love it! It's nice that you can pipe to jless the same way you
| would pipe to less. Super useful for navigating through kube
| resources, eg:
|
| kubectl get pod mypod-0 -n namespace0 -o json | jless
| danso wrote:
| Glad I fought the reflex to jump straight into the comments with
| "So how is this different than jq" and instead actually clicked
| through to see the wonderful homepage that instantly answered my
| question via animated GIF. I'm a sucker for trying out any new
| CLI tool and this looks genuinely and immediately useful. Thanks!
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Homebrew?
| CodeIsTheEnd wrote:
| That's certainly the plan! I've never released a project like
| this, so I wasn't sure what the process is for adding things to
| Homebrew, or other package managers. A few people have been
| really helpful and already added it to Arch Linux and NetBSD's
| package managers.
|
| This week I just wanted to get the project out there to see if
| people liked it, so I compiled stuff locally and manually
| uploaded them to the GitHub releases page. I'll spend some time
| over the next few weeks figuring out how to automate a lot of
| these things.
| andrewjluo wrote:
| Relied on this a lot while working on a web scraping project!
| Crazy useful for quickly parsing long JSON responses.
| mimslee32 wrote:
| Such a dope and useful tool, gonna be using it a bunch :)
| ccakes wrote:
| Nice! I've been using jsonfui[1] which does something similar but
| will definitely give this a go
|
| [1] https://github.com/AdrianSchneider/jsonfui
| veganjay wrote:
| Very nice! I also thought "how is this different than jq" - glad
| I clicked on the link - this will be very helpful in my toolset!
| Thanks!
| [deleted]
| cyrdax wrote:
| ive used this. its awesome!!
| g105b wrote:
| This is a lovely product. I would like to use it and compare to
| jq, which I already use to query the contents of a JSON structure
| from the CLI.
| TheDong wrote:
| > This is a lovely product
|
| It's a lovely project, a lovely tool.
|
| I think calling it a "product" devalues it, implies it's being
| used to sell something or exploit its users.
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(page generated 2022-02-11 23:00 UTC)