2,845 stars · MIT, read from /blob/main/LICENSE on 2026-09-27; copyright 2022 Noah Gorstein, no added conditions · v0.8.0 (2025-09-28), read from /releases/latest and settled by ungh · Track this in Scout
A terminal window where a jq filter is written against a JSON file and the result updates as you type.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
jqp is a small program that loads a JSON file and lets you write a jq filter against it with the result shown live beside it. jq is the standard command-line tool for pulling values out of JSON, and its syntax is powerful and easy to get wrong.
What it is good for. Anyone who works with an API and keeps rewriting the same filter at the shell prompt to see what it does. The normal loop is edit, run, squint, edit again. Here the feedback is immediate and the text is highlighted, so a complicated expression is assembled visually instead. It reads a file with -f or takes input piped in, and it handles both ordinary JSON and the line-by-line kind. The finished expression is then copied into a script, which is the actual point of the tool.
- Immediate feedback with syntax highlighting turns writing a hard filter into a few seconds of iteration instead of a dozen shell commands.
- Packaged unusually widely for a project this size — Homebrew, MacPorts, the Arch user repository, Snap, and prebuilt binaries — so most people install it with one line and never see the Go toolchain.
- MIT, one static file, nothing to configure before the first run, and it carries its own copy of
jqinternally so you do not needjqinstalled.
- It has slowed down. The last release, v0.8.0, is dated 28 September 2025, which is almost twelve months ago, and no code has landed since 6 February 2026 — about seven and a half months. It works, and it is well inside the line this report draws, but it is the quietest project in this edition.
- It helps you compose a filter; it does not replace
jqin your scripts. The useful output is the expression, and you carry it out of the window by hand. - Appearance is configured only by hand-writing a file at
$HOME/.jqp.yaml. There is no settings screen, no documentation site, and no stated memory figure — which matters, because the whole input file is held in memory while you filter it.
- antonmedv/fx
20,641 stars, a JSON viewer and processor you can navigate with the keyboard; better for exploring a document, less focused on composing one filter.
Track this in Scout - ynqa/jnv
6,117 stars, the closest match of the three and the busier project, with code landing on 24 September 2026.
Track this in Scout - PaulJuliusMartinez/jless
5,503 stars, a reader for large JSON files with folding and search; it shows and does not filter.
Track this in Scout
brew install jqp # macOS or Linux with Homebrew sudo snap install jqp # Ubuntu and friends go install github.com/noahgorstein/jqp@latest # needs Go 1.24 or newer
