jless is a command-line JSON viewer. Use it as a replacement for whatever combination of less, jq, cat and your editor you currently use for viewing JSON files. It is written in Rust and can be installed as a single standalone binary.

jless is under active development. I often stream development live on Twitch.

Features

• Clean syntax highlighted display of JSON data, omitting quotes around object keys, closing object and array delimiters, and trailing commas.
• Expand and collapse objects and arrays so you can see both the high- and low-level structure of the data.
• A wealth of vim-inspired movement commands for efficiently moving around and viewing data.
• Full regex-based search for finding exactly the data you're looking for.

jless currently supports macOS and Linux. Windows support is planned.

Installation

The releases contains links to the latest release. If you have a Rust toolchain installed, you can build from source by running cargo install jless.

Logo

The mascot of the jless project is Jules the jellyfish.

Art for Jules was created by annatgraphics.

License

jless is released under the MIT License.

Miscellaneous

In order to cross-compile for Linux on a Mac, I ran:

brew tap SergioBenitez/osxct brew install x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu CARGO_TARGET_X86_64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_LINKER=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu-gcc cargo build --release --target=x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu