Using jq to format JSON on the clipboard
stefanvdw1
55 points
19 comments
September 02, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (13 comments)
stefanvdw1
Not mine, just very useful
dpflan
There is also: - xq for xml - yq for yaml
mhalikosen
I didn't even know such a tool existed until Opus used it.
OskarS
Lovely little alias, but I much prefer fracjson[0] pretty printing to jq, so I might go with that instead! [0]: https://github.com/j-brooke/FracturedJson
netsharc
A universal tool (well, since I use Windows, a Windows tool) to modify the clipboard would be cool. So, copy text to clipboard, press a hotkey to popup the menu, and it'll offer options depending on the detected text. For example changing the clipboard contents to prettified (if it detects JSON, XML, HTML), or formatting a number back and forth (e.g. working with SSN's out of numerical DB entries when they prefer AAA-GG-SSSS).
pletnes
Cool idea! I think it would look better as a function than an alias, but that doesn’t matter much.
lkbm
I have this as a bash script and a some similar bash and python scripts for converting between python's print(my_dict) and json, or to run some python (mostly the dicts) through black. The j2p is pretty self-evident if you know any python, and the only trick to p2j was knowing `ast.literal_eval(input_str)`.
nullgeo
I like the version where it throws the error. That way I will realize I might not have copied the right JSON (or forgotten to copy)
chamomeal
I have a similar alias for borkdude’s ‘jet’ tool. The extra nice thing about jet is you can convert json into edn, then pipe it into an inline babashka repl where you can inspect the object with all the power of clojure. It is super duper nice for quickly looking through hunks (even huge hunks) of json. You can sum things up, filter through thousands of elements, generate a json schema with malli, whatever you want!
_flux
I use similar approach for fixing up clipboard contents with tr '\n' ' ' | sed 's/\t/ /g; s/ */ /g' But also I switched to xsel at one point, as xclip doesn't seem to deal as well with unicode. It could be xclip has been fixed since then, though.
bilkow
Loved it! I made this version for `fish` and `wl-clipboard`: function clipboard-format-json # Inspired by https://chris48s.github.io/blogmarks/posts/2021/jsontidy/ if set -l formatted "$(wl-paste | jq '.')" wl-copy $formatted end end By saving it to .config/fish/functions/clipboard-format-json.fish, it should immediately work
1-more
I do a lot of this and `pbpaste | sed s/^ // | pbcopy` and things like that. It just fits my brain better. What's nice about raycast as a macOS pasteboard manager is that whatever you last selected via Cmd-Shift-V is the output of `pbpaste`. I'm not 100% sure how that is affected by copying images though.
wodenokoto
I set up my Linux on WSL to use 'pbpaste' and 'pbcopy' as shorthand’s for the long and hard to remember native commands. On mobile, but I believe for one of them on WSL is something like 'paste.exe'