Atul Gawande is a surgeon by training and an exceptional writer. He has authored several other wonderful books, known for his ability to explain complex topics in an accessible way. His website (http://atulgawande.com) features his books, articles, and papers along with information about his other endeavors.
There was a lot of effort to add many more help guides that provide context-sensitive help where you need it. The main complaint I’ve read from people is that VisiData is too complex. The last few releases have attempted to address these concerns with the guides, the command palette, and the menu system. I think these all provide help when it is needed.
Though I think it is possible to get a lot done with VisiData only knowing a handful of commands/operations.
You can find reviews of hundreds of CLI And TUI programs, some great, others barely known and clearly forgotten. The last review is from 2015. Some reviews are very short, others are more involved.
The site is a blog with a tagline "Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux". The author K.Mandla is opinionated and has certain preferences for such programs like [1].
I have not looked at the site in years, but if you are willing to explore, this could be a fun option to find a variety of these tools.
I don't think this would work as a lesspipe.sh viewer, since it is interactive.
I have wanted this for VisiData for data files. You would need a wrapper around less that could start other programs instead of less.
You might be interested in Tidy Viewer with lesspipe.sh
This fx rewrite is very exciting. I'll have to try it. I thought of fx as a wrapper around jq, that allowed quick iteration over building jq scripts. Sort of an Ultimate Plumber [1] but only for jq. It looks like it is now more like a JavaScript processor plus an interactive viewer.
Someone mention Visidata[2]? VisiData is also a TUI that is great on tabular data, and it can work with json. If your JSON is mostly tabular in nature, Visidata does a great job at showing that data and allowing you to explore it. A lot of json I deal with is tabular-like data. There is a great tutorial [3], that can help you get your bearings with Visidata. Once you understand those basics you might want to look at this thread [4] for what commands you can use with json.
I also find VisiData is useful for adhoc exploring of JSON data. You can also use it to explore multiple other formats. I find it really helpful, plus it gives that little burst of adrenaline from its responsive TUI, similar to fx and jless mentioned.
For my toolbox I include jq, gron, miller, VisiData, in addition to classics like sed, awk, and perl.
Actually the Vikram said he had initially added a search feature and it didn't appear to be very useful. He says:
search is an awful way to curate text when your readers don't know what is interesting about it. This is obvious in retrospect, but it didn't occur to me until I showed what I built to folks.
I would be interested to see what an LLM could make out of this archive. How it might categorize the threads or how it might help make sense of it. Vikram's manual curation is the useful part. In the podcast, he mentions he would like to see what could be done with an AI and the archive.
I hope he'll return to writing.
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