# jq 75 Hacker News commenters recommended jq and 33 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule. **Verdict:** Command-line tool for filtering and reshaping JSON, used in shell pipelines and API work. Critics find its operator syntax cryptic and hard to remember. ## Why people recommend it - Handy one-liner in shell scripts (4 comments): "jq is supposed to fit in to other bash scripts as a one liner. That's it's super power." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47540954)) "jq and regex really are sort of handy one liners that you invoke in other scripts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49154194)) "piping through jq, chaining commands, redirecting to files... that's stuff I do daily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47212979)) - Handles large JSON files quickly (3 comments): "JQ is very convenient, even if your files are more than 100GB." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542074)) "I don't think I remember one case where jq wasn't fast enough" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47542111)) "what vastly improved the usefulness when working with big json responses" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46258422)) - Simple, intuitive syntax (3 comments): "I find jq’s syntax and semantics to be simple and intuitive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543413)) "I love jq, though. It provides an extremely good language for its task" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48866782)) "The first 500 words explain more or less the entire language and how it works." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47541887)) - Works well with curl for APIs (3 comments): "providing a few curl + jq oneliners to interact with a REST API works great in my experience" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714728)) "Given curl, jq, and awk, you can create a quick MVP client for almost any api" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46177247)) "It would seem that curl + jq represents most of the solution these days." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49784533)) ## What people warn about - Cryptic, hard-to-remember syntax (5 comments): "even LLMs often can't get the jq filter syntax right, or when they do, it looks terrifyingly cryptic and confusing" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47733379)) "It's a nuclear weapon but it's almost a programming language and I never can keep the operators in mind" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48866568)) "Why most people strangulate themselves with confusing jq operators unnecessarily" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47548414)) - Trial and error to learn (3 comments): "the pipelining has some implicit contextual stuff going on that I have to arrive at by trial and error each time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546017)) "I feel like I'm still a beginner because I don't get where I want to go on the first several attempts" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47546779)) "it did take me a while to come to terms with the syntax of assigning variables" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47551337)) - Slow on very large data (2 comments): "The problem is jq would need to JSON parse all that data which will be expensive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47443068)) "using yq / jq to performn a query was much (order of magnitudes) slower (>10m)" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46676916)) - Tangled pipelines hard to maintain (2 comments): "I know jq can do wonderful things, but I'd seriously question anyone's competency if you're building a production code base that relies on a tangled mess of jq piping commands" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47214424)) "even jq gets hairy when you have to do a bigger query or transformation" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605311)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [fzf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fzf.md): 78 recommend - [grep](https://hackerapproved.com/p/grep.md): 65 recommend - [Atuin](https://hackerapproved.com/p/atuin.md): 63 recommend - [GitHub CLI](https://hackerapproved.com/p/github-cli.md): 49 recommend - [ImageMagick](https://hackerapproved.com/p/imagemagick.md): 37 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "jq", https://hackerapproved.com/p/jq/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).