Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer

I browsed Fiverr to find a few artists whose styles were similar to what I had in mind, then messaged a few of them. annatgraphics [1] was able to take my crude color pencil sketches and turn them into the slick art you see today!

[1]: https://www.fiverr.com/annatgraphics

FWIW I was unable to install it on Mac using cargo which compiles it from Rust. Here is the error I got.

    error[E0658]: or-patterns syntax is experimental
       --> /Users/xxxx/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/jless-0.7.1/src/app.rs:101:26
        |
    101 |                 KeyEvent(Key::Ctrl('c') | Key::Char('q')) => break,
        |                          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
        |
        = note: see issue #54883  for more information

    error[E0658]: or-patterns syntax is experimental
      --> /Users/xxxx/.cargo/registry/src/github.com-1ecc6299db9ec823/jless-0.7.1/src/jsonparser.rs:67:24
       |
    67 |         while let Some(JsonToken::Whitespace | JsonToken::Newline) = self.peek_token_or_eof() {
       |                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
       |
       = note: see issue #54883  for more information

    error: aborting due to 2 previous errors

    For more information about this error, try `rustc --explain E0658`.
    error: failed to compile `jless v0.7.1`, intermediate artifacts can be found at `/var/folders/7n/jbbdpxnj373d5trx65_bryhr0000gr/T/cargo-installUE4dQ5`

    Caused by:
      could not compile `jless`

Seems like your Rust version is a bit out of date. Nested or-patterns have been stabilised in Rust 1.53.0, which came out back in June.

It's a generally good idea though, website screenshots (and thinking about it now, animations) from test automation is another similar task.

Not quite standard practice, though some people do bits of it here and there, but both probably should become so which would amortize the cost over lots of cli tools.

I have no idea about the odds and didn't bother to look up the timeline but I can give you some anecdata and tell you exactly why I might have theoretically been the 4th lurker-become-excited-commenter for this post, were I to read this first on the computer instead of on my phone (and nearer real time than on a following weekend) and less hesitant to post comments in general:

I find json to be a PITA to parse as a human when looking at getting a bigger picture or keys/values that are strewn away from each other and not just e.g. two values next to each other. Anytime I have to do something with it, I have to search through my history to dig out some jq invocation and then try to tweak it correctly to do what the (most of the time similar but also different enough) task at hand needs. My mind sadly just seems to be unable to sufficiently grok jq.

So when I read here about jless I was stoked and the excitement was strong enough to want to dig out my login credentials and make a comment along the lines of "This is AWESOME! Thank you so much for making life easier!". In the end, when I logged in on the computer and had reflected more, I opted to upvote a comment instead and then saw this thread; so thank you, I guess, for providing me an opportunity or excuse to express my enthusiasm in addition to that.

I consider my discovery of jless (which sadly I was apparently not able to make on my own while searching the internet for json tools previously - so yay for lurking on HN :-) - but it might also partly be the relative (to my predicament) youth of the tool) of similar importance to me as macros in vim or back in the days using bluefish for editing HTML as they all save my time being spent on doing tooling to do things and instead allow it to being spent on doing things directly. (BTW thanks to all these devs!)

Just my 2 cents :-) (and I'm not particularly interested in starting or partaking in any further discussion)