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

You can install jless using various package managers:

| Operating System / Package Manager | Command | | ---------------------------------- | ------- | | macOS - HomeBrew | brew install jless | | macOS - MacPorts | sudo port install jless | | Linux - HomeBrew | brew install jless | | Arch Linux | pacman -U jless | | NetBSD | pkgin install jless | | FreeBSD | pkg install jless |

If you have a Rust toolchain installed, you can install jless from source by running cargo install jless.

The releases page also contains links to binaries for various architectures.

Dependencies

On Linux systems, X11 libraries are needed to build clipboard access if building from source. On Ubuntu you can install these using:

sudo apt-get install libxcb1-dev libxcb-render0-dev libxcb-shape0-dev libxcb-xfixes0-dev

Website

jless.io is the official website for jless. Code for the website is contained separately on the website branch.

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.