I wanted a tool that could flatten JSON, filter it, colorize output, and fetch from a URL — all from

the terminal. Something between jq and gron but with a cleaner, more intuitive API. So I built

jray . This is the honest post-mortem of how it went.

GitHub: github.com/siyadhkc/jray

Website: siyadhkc.github.io/Jray

Why I built it

Every time I'm debugging an API response or poking around some nested config file, I reach for jq .

And every time, I spend the first five minutes googling the syntax again. jq is powerful — genuinely

— but it's its own language, and unless you're writing complex transformations daily, that overhead

adds up.

gron is the other tool I kept coming back to. It flattens JSON into greppable dot-notation, which

is exactly what you want when you're trying to find where a deeply nested key lives. But gron is

read-only. You can't filter and get structured output back. You can't fetch from a URL.…