A handpicked selection of the best developer tools.

Here are the best tool picks of this edition. Visit the archive.

In this edition:

• jq – Command-line JSON processor

• gojq – Pure Go implementation of jq

• jqp – A TUI playground to experiment with jq

• jqi –The almighty jq processor, wrapped in a graphical UI

jq - Command-line JSON processor

Visit jq

This is one of those terminal utilities that almost every developer has heard of. It’s incredibly powerful. Simply put: if you work with JSON in any capacity (and let’s be honest, who doesn’t?), you need to master this tool.

In case you haven't encountered it before, jq is a command-line tool that allows you to parse, query, and process JSON data. Here are a few examples of what it can do:

To get the most out of it, I use the following aliases in my Fish config:

### Pretty-print JSON
jq '.'

### Filter and extract specific fields
jq '.name, .age' data.json

### Query nested JSON structures
jq '.users[] | select(.age > 30) | .name' users.json

There are countless tutorials out there to help you learn jq, so I’ll just leave a few links here to get you started:

• jq official manual

• How To Transform JSON Data with jq

• jq tutorials on GitHub

• jq Playground

gojq - Pure Go implementation of jq

Visit gojq on GitHub

gojq is effectively a drop-in replacement for the traditional jq. It allows you to do the exact same things, but with one significant improvement—it provides much better error messages. Written in Go, it can also be used as a library in Go projects. For most users, gojq should be your default choice over the original jq.

Pro tip: Since some tools or scripts might expect jq in your system PATH and may not recognize gojq, I recommend creating a symlink to gojq under the name jq:

ln -s $(which gojq) /usr/local/bin/jq

jqp - A TUI playground to experiment with jq

Visit jqp on GitHub

For those looking to become jq masters, you’re going to love this. jqp offers a TUI (Terminal User Interface) playground where you can load JSON input and practice building and refining your queries. It’s an excellent tool if you're following a tutorial and want a quick way to experiment with different commands and filters.

jqi - The almighty jq processor, wrapped in a graphical UI

Visit jqi on GitHub

Not a fan of TUIs? No worries! jqi offers a standalone app that provides a similar experience but with a more graphical user interface (GUI). It’s perfect for those who prefer visual environments over the terminal for testing and experimenting with JSON queries.

For a deeper dive, you can check out this great tutorial.

See you in the next edition 👋🏻