Fx v36 - JSON terminal viewer

25 points by antonmedv

Hello Lobsters, I’m the author of a fx tool. I’ve been working hard past month to develop a new version of a fx with a lot of improvements and fixes. Please check them out.

alerque

I package fx for Arch Linux and it is a useful tool.

~~The gratuitous choice to use NSFW material in the v36 release notes was not appreciated.~~ Thanks for cleaning it up; stay classy folks.

antonmedv

I removed the png of images preview :)
- mayli
  
  I like that image :/
antonmedv

Sorry, about that. I didn’t think it would be NSFW image.

But I hope it will note diverge focus of what actual cool new feature fx brings.

I was working hard on developing the new v36.

minus

jless is a good alternative to fx. I prefer its UX but I forgot exactly what’s different.

antonmedv
Yes, people usually mention jless under each fx post =) And I think jless is cool! It is good to have a competitor. When jless released it boosted my interest in improving fx.

But I think fx have much more features:
- most importantly, fx wraps long strings so the whole content is visible.
- fx has processing capabilities (powered by goja JS runtime).
- and with v36 release I added ton of new features to fx.

nathell

I love fx. It provides a significant boost to my quality of life when querying JSON-returning APIs from the command line (Vespa comes to mind). And because there are command-line tools for converting pretty much everything tree-shaped to JSON, you can interactively search it all in the terminal with fx.

Thanks a lot, Anton!

antonmedv

Glad to hear this. Thanks!

zmitchell

I use fx all the time for exploring information returned by Nix eg from “nix path-info”, “nix derivation show”, etc

antonmedv

As with all new releases, bugs maybe present. I did quite a bit of refactoring. So I will find all findings in next releases.

BTW, I learned what in Go string takes more memory than []byte. And those adds up quickly. Espessially on opening ~4GB JSON files.

ema-pe

Interesting! I currently use jless to view and explore JSON (actually JSONL) files ranging in size from 1MB to 1GB. Do you know of this other program and how your tool compares to it (aside from the Rust vs. Go languages)?

antonmedv
Here are main differences:
- fx wraps long strings, so the whole content is visible.
- fx has builtin js engine (via goja) which can be used to process and modify JSON files.
- fx has zsh/bash autocomplete for JSON fields (I personally use this most of the time).
For example: here is a way to do edit in place:
```
fx example.json 'x.name = x.name.toUpperCase(), x' 'save'
```
- ema-pe
  
  Thank you! So in reality fx is just more than a simple JSON viewer like less (from which jless is inspired).
laktak

You should mention TUI in the title/tags to make it easier to find
- antonmedv
  
  Will do!