Jless – a command-line JSON viewer (written in Rust)

by vicek22 • 4 years ago

202 52 4 years ago

hericium• 4 years ago

There was a Show HN by the author recently with an 80+ comments discussion: "Show HN: Jless, a command-line JSON viewer"[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30273940

Shadonototra• 4 years ago

Buuuut, this one doesn't have the "written in Rust" in the title

ludovicianul• 4 years ago

Exactly. I've submitted something written in Java, while something similar (and far inferior in features) written in Rust drew lot more attention

CodeIsTheEnd4• 4 years ago

Author here! When I originally submitted it, it didn't get a lot of traction (it got on the front-page via the second chance pool a couple days later), and I definitely regretted not including "written in Rust" in the title. I'm acutely aware of HN's love of Rust, and the subsequent grumbling about always bringing it up that something is written in Rust, so I left it out with the false illusion that not mentioning it would make it more "pure" or something.

But I was also pretty confident that I made something useful, and, in hindsight, I don't think I should have preemptively felt bad about using some "cheap" form of marketing to get people to see it. I have really conflicting thoughts about marketing and self-promotion from my experience trying to show people my other project, plaintextsports.com [1] (live sports scores in plain text with no ads or trackers so it loads instantly! I think the HN crowd would love it!). There's a weird line between marketing and advertising and self-promotion, where one is "ok", but the other is frowned upon. It's also a tale as old as time that the better marketed but technically inferior product wins out. (AC vs DC initially, Betamax vs VHS!) How much of success is being brazen enough to ignore those norms and shamelessly promote something? Should it be considered shameful to promote it in the first place?

In this case, being written in Rust is definitely a feature, as least when comparing tools! fx [2], a similar tool that made the front-page a couple months ago runs using Node, and I'm sure jless can handle bigger files and uses less memory (though admittedly I haven't actually verified this).

[1] https://plaintextsports.com

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29861043

syrusakbary• 4 years ago

Funnily enough I also submitted the same two days ago (I didn’t saw the original show HN)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30435576

leecommamichael• 4 years ago

Rust, by the way

seanw444• 4 years ago

It seems like the new meta to get HN points.

"New software project (WRITTEN IN RUST) (COPS CALLED) (GONE WRONG)"

semitones2• 4 years ago

It's not meaningless though. With all the checks and balances that the rust compiler enforces, you have a higher likelihood of having a correct and less buggy program.

8n4vidtmkvmk• 4 years ago

I use jq but it's not interactive like this

semitones2• 4 years ago

I love it!

zeppelin101• 4 years ago

I don't always use applications posted on HackerNews, but when I do, they're ones written in Rust.

f1refly3• 4 years ago

Look, I don't have a need for this application, but from the presentation of supported platforms:

Linux
Homebrew
Arch Linux
pacman -U jless

First, if you have to revert to homebrew as a package manager on gnu/linux you might as well tell the user to just use cargo directly, that way users only have to install the rust toolchain as opposed to the rust toolchain plus an alien package manger. The typical way would be to make cargo compile the thing, place in in ~/.local somewhere and add that path to PATH.

Second, "pacman -U ARG" installs from a file or from a URI. jless is neither. You have to properly package it before pacman will install from a file, which means you have to write a PKGBUILD file with some metadata and build instructions (about 20 lines) and call makepkg, which will then produce the package (a .tar.xz file if I'm not mistaken).

I suggest you first test the instructions you put on your website.

CodeIsTheEnd4• 4 years ago

Sorry! Someone already filed an issue about this [1], but I haven't had time to investigate exactly what is appropriate to put there. I don't use Linux, nor have I ever released and distributed open-source software before, so I'm just kinda guessing here -- other people have added the project to various package managers, not me.

Installing via Linux Homebrew is simply listed as an option because it's available as a Homebrew formula. And the option to install via cargo is also noted.

[1] https://github.com/PaulJuliusMartinez/jless/issues/46

boudin• 4 years ago

As mentioned in this issue you should not give an install command since it's in the AUR. You can just mention it's available in the AUR and provide a link to the package instead: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/jless

akvadrako3• 4 years ago

I find linuxbrew to be a welcome option since it's one of the most generic methods available.

It works on most distros and for most languages, instead of being tied to, say, rust or arch.

f1refly3• 4 years ago

But, as said, for it to work you have to set up yet another package manager which will works against the systems package manager, leading to out of date packages and probably broken dependencies. Rust already has a working system that will put binaries to a standardized place that will properly integrate.

ziml773• 4 years ago

I like Linuxbrew because I can install things without needing to mess with the system packages. I'm using it on my TrusNAS SCALE server to install things like fish and neovim. The stance of iXsystems has always been that TrueNAS is an appliance and you shouldn't touch the system packages, so I try not to apt install anything.

bluejekyll2• 4 years ago

you might as well tell the user to just use cargo directly

For Rust projects, there really is no need for more than this. It might take a bit longer, but it’s simple and easy.

heleninboodler• 4 years ago

I really hope this trend doesn't continue, honestly. I shouldn't need the toolchain for a language that something was written in just to use that thing. It's very common with Go projects, too, but it's kind of a reversion back to the "./configure; make ; make install" days.

nurbel• 4 years ago

Great tool thanks! I'll try to catch the livestream !

One thing that would be great to smoothen my use-case is a better resize support. I generally have a bunch of terminals on a screen, and switch to full screen when needed. Currently, the drawing region does not update.

raesene9• 4 years ago

I've started using jless for interacting with things like the Kubelet API, it makes browsing through the response a lot easier when I don't know exactly what I'm looking for.

cloverr20• 4 years ago

The ability to expand and collapse keys and moving around the sibling keys is great, the help was at the place where I expected it to be, ":h". I love this!

ivanhoe• 4 years ago

I usually just pipe jq output to less, but this is way nicer, thank you!

harel3• 4 years ago

This looks cool but HomeBrew for linux is a no go for me. Multiple system level package managers is asking for trouble.

AzzieElbab• 4 years ago

Use cargo? It is user level

harel3• 4 years ago

Yes, I can and will, but the point was "why homebrew for linux?". Later I read the author was just not familiar with the Linux ecosystem which pretty much answered my question.

nooyurrsdey• 4 years ago

Nice job! Looks useful

dmos62• 4 years ago

Hm, ctrl-d and ctrl-u don't work for me, for some reason (keybinds for scrolling in screen-halves), and scrolling and moving of cursor causes jittering, which is distracting.

I'm using lxterm.

Nice tool otherwise!

CodeIsTheEnd4• 4 years ago

Oops, sorry, I haven't actually made a new release with those commands yet. I'll need to have better discipline maintaining a separate `latest` branch for the website...

phonebucket• 4 years ago

This does look like a useful tool. Especially since `jq | less` is a very common pattern for me.

Apologies if this might take things a little off-topic. But I can recall seeing "written in Rust" in the titles of quite a few HN posts. Is there any relevance to this? From my perspective, the utility of a given project/product could (or even should) be judged independently of the programming language that it was implemented in.

tslater2006• 4 years ago

As someone that has recently started learning Rust, I am certainly interested in looking at source for bigger projects than I've made. Getting a feel for patterns and examples of how to do certain things.

If your interest in jless is about its utility, you are right, language doesn't matter. If your interest in jless is looking at its code, I think language is relevant. And personally seeing it in the title let's me know without clicking that I might want to check out it's code later.

scandox• 4 years ago

I think there's a legitimate interest in the popularity and adoption of Rust because a lot of people are curious to see if it will really stick.

So I for one find it interesting and it affects my sense of how it will play out.

ziml773• 4 years ago

Very true. The choice of a language isn't just driven by how appealing it is to oneself, but also how appealing it is to the broader population of developers. If you use a language that no one wants to work with then you're going to have a tough time getting people to want to contribute. You also end up limited on the third-party libraries that are available if you pick a language that isn't popular.

aynawn• 4 years ago

Another contender is gron which does the same. It's written in golang instead of rust.

https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron

markstos• 4 years ago

I have used Gron-- it's very useful and easy to learn and use.

gav• 4 years ago

I might be weird, but I find gron invaluable for figuring out what I need to pass to jq.

   gron log.json | grep https
   # see a json.log.entries[334].request.url

   jq -r '.log.entries[] | .request.url' log.json

xanathar• 4 years ago

Feature suggestion: pressing some hotkey exits and prints the path that could be used in jq to select the node that was selected when the hotkey was pressed.

I'm sure it has a lot of corner cases as a feature, but that would be super-useful as companion tool to jq.

rmetzler2• 4 years ago

This is something I often use gron for. And having something like this as output from jless was my feature request the last time I saw this tool on HN.

I see it's added now, but it's not possible to select and copy. I'm also not sure about the keys, h or ? doesn't bring up any help text.

Jless – a command-line JSON viewer (written in Rust)

Related Stories