I too can never remember jq syntax when I need to. I usually just end up writing a Python script to extract the part of the JSON I need.
gron transforms JSON into discrete assignments to make it easier to grep for what you want https://github.com/tomnomnom/gron
Miller is like awk, sed, cut, join, and sort for data formats such as CSV, TSV, JSON, JSON https://github.com/johnkerl/miller
You can `grep` through it, yes. But since the output is still structured to be Javascript (which makes it nice in some more immediate ways if you're working interactively) makes it tricky to deal with with e.g. `awk` -- you'd still have to parse the JS line and implement string unescaping, which still makes it more complicated than necessary. And if you work e.g. on JSON in a bash variable, running `gron -v` also is cumbersome enough for me to want to use another tool.
So, I still like `gron`, I just think it has a rather small niche. One that maybe could be a bit larger if there was a way for it to output delimited records with user-specified delimiters (provided you know the output enough to be sure they don't appear in any strings).
I suggested the above for those that can't justify the time it takes to make JQ perform well for whatever relatively minor needs they have.
JQ is back under active development and there are a number of optimised | Go | Rust spinoff github projects that'll likely do some interesting work now that the mainline is starting to release again.
Same here! That's why for small things I made pyxargs [1] to use python in the shell. In another thread I also just learned of pyp [2] which I haven't tried yet but looks like it's even better for this use case.
A python script is the sane extensible choice rather than some esoteric bash incantation that you have no clue about 6 months after writing it.