jless

jless is an interactive, keyboard-driven JSON viewer for the terminal. Rather than piping JSON through python -m json.tool or squinting at a wall of minified text, jless gives you a collapsible tree view with syntax highlighting, vim-style navigation, and a search mode — all without leaving the terminal.

Features

• Collapsible tree view — expand and collapse objects and arrays to focus on the parts of the document you care about
• Vim-style navigation — hjkl, gg/G, {/}, Ctrl+d/Ctrl+u all work as you'd expect
• Search — / searches forward, ? searches backward, through both keys and values
• Multiple view modes — toggle between the default line-oriented view and a raw data view
• Copy to clipboard — yank the current node's value or path with a keypress
• Piped input — reads from stdin or a file, works naturally in shell pipelines
• YAML support — can also display YAML documents in addition to JSON

Installation

cargo install jless

Or via your system package manager:

# macOS
brew install jless

# Arch Linux
pacman -S jless

# Nix
nix-env -iA nixpkgs.jless

# Debian / Fedora
# Pre-built Linux binaries are available on the
# [releases page](https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless/releases).

Usage

# View a JSON file
jless data.json

# Pipe JSON from a command
curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless | jless

# View a YAML file
jless config.yaml

# Start with all nodes collapsed
jless --collapse data.json

Keybindings

Tips

• Collapse everything first — press c to recursively collapse all nodes, then expand only what you need. This is the fastest way to navigate a deeply nested document.
• Use with jq — pipe jq output into jless for a great exploration workflow:

  curl -s https://api.github.com/orgs/rust-lang/repos | jq '.[] | {name, stars: .stargazers_count}' | jless

• Use the path display — the current node's full JSON path is always shown at the bottom of the screen, so you always know where you are in the document.