PaulJuliusMartinez/jless

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

5468 stars · 118 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

jless is a command-line JSON viewer written in Rust for reading, exploring, and searching JSON data with syntax highlighting, collapsible objects/arrays, vim-inspired navigation, and regex search. It installs as a single standalone binary and is a replacement for combining less, jq, cat, and an editor.

Use cases

• view and explore large json files in the terminal
• pretty print json with syntax highlighting
• debug api request and response payloads
• search json data with regular expressions
• collapse and expand nested json objects and arrays
• copy unescaped string values from json to clipboard

When to choose

• you frequently inspect json files or api responses in the terminal
• you want a vim-like navigation experience for structured data
• you need a fast single-binary tool without runtime dependencies
• you find jq output hard to read and want an interactive viewer

When to avoid

• you need Windows support, which is not yet available
• you need to transform or query json programmatically rather than view it (use jq)
• you want a GUI json viewer
• you need yaml or other formats beyond json

Facets

cli-tool · maturity active

developer-tools cli json search-engine developer-tools files cli rust json-viewer terminal-ui vim-inspired syntax-highlighting pager command-line macos linux

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="PaulJuliusMartinez/jless")