Have you seen gron[0]? It's similar: flattens JSON documents to make them easily greppable. But it also can revert (ie, ungron) so you can pipe json to gron, grep -v to remove some data, then ungron to get it back to json.
The project linked to is from 2014 with last update in 2015.and it is on NPM...
What is left to say? Thank you!
It still feels like there must be something in between, some way to make queries with json more naturally, than with jq, yet with enough power.
It might help to recognize how it's influenced by shell languages and XPath, if you're familiar with those.
The idea of flattening, grepping, then reverting sounds very appealing and sounds like a better fit for me.
I don't think you really need neither `.` nor `-C`. Just `jq` seems to do the same colored output of the input by default.
`-C` would be required when piping because most of the time (with the exception of piping into less) when stdout is not a terminal, it doesn't make sense to include terminal color escape sequences. You'd end up with those codes in your files, and grep would be looking at them for matches, for example.
`.` would be required when passing the file as an argument instead of stdin, because jq interprets the first argument as jq-code. If you don't include `.` it would interpret the filename as jq-code.
I do honestly think jq is a cool and powerful tool. I also appreciate little things like auto-color when appropriate--git also does this. Git also uses your pager, which might trivialize my personal use case.
There are cases when you have some complicated json and just want to search for stuff. Then you use grep + gron.
There are cases when you want a complete json processing tool. Then you use jq.
You can probably simulate each approach with the other approach, but the code needed to this is just too tedious to write. So you use whatever tool fits your use case.