Jq: Colored pagination

[neowulf]

Objective: Ability to paginate colored output.

I didn't find any documentation regarding a pagination switch within the jq tool. The only quick recourse for a user is to pipe the jq output to a less like utility. However, this does not yield the colored output.

If the colors were rendered as raw control characters - piping the colored output to less -R would make this feature a possibility.

[wtlangford]

Do jq -C jq args | less -R

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015, 18:19 neowulf33 [email protected] wrote:

Objective: Ability to paginate colored output.

I didn't find any documentation regarding a pagination switch within the
jq tool. The only quick recourse for a user is to pipe the jq output to a
less like utility. However, this does not yield the colored output.

If the colors were rendered as raw control characters - piping the colored
output to less -R would make this feature a possibility.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
https://github.com/stedolan/jq/issues/764.

[neowulf]

Cool that works! Thanks.

[wfxr]

Thanks for @wtlangford 's solution. It works as expected.

But I found write -C ... | less -R again and again is very boring. Especially when I need modify the arguments frequently.

Put the following function at bashrc or zshrc will release your fingers:

jqjq() {
    # -F tell less exit if output content can be displayed on one screen
    jq -C "$@" | less -FR
}

Then you use jqjq the same way as jq. When the content is too long, less will automatically take over it.

jqjq args

If you don't like to use another command, add one more line:

alias jq='jqjq'

Now everything doesn't change. Pager will be used when necessory.

jq args