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…
Jless, a command-line JSON viewer launched on February 9, 2022 with 344 votes, #40 of 2,645 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 4 years on.
In plain words
Jless is a command-line JSON viewer that displays data with a browser-like interface accessible from the terminal. It includes vim-inspired keyboard navigation, full-text regex search, and supports newline-delimited JSON output. Designed for developers who frequently inspect JSON data structures, it offers an alternative to combining command-line tools like cat, jq, and less.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
jless | plaintextsports.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
Does a similar job
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Jqview, a simple native GUI for inspecting JSON with jq2020 · github.com · ▲208simplest possible native GUI for inspecting JSON objects with jq - fiatjaf/jqview
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Catj – A new way to display JSON files2019 · github.com · ▲388Displays JSON files in a flat format. Contribute to soheilpro/catj development by creating an account on GitHub.
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