nless is a terminal user interface pager for exploring structured and semi-structured data.
It’s designed for piping in command output, log files, CSV, TSV, JSON, and other delimited text, then reshaping the data into columns so it can be searched, filtered, sorted, grouped, and inspected interactively from the terminal.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Automatically infers common input formats including CSV, TSV, JSON, space-aligned output, regex-based parsing, and raw text.
- Supports streaming input with tail mode, arrival timestamps, and time window filtering for data that’s still arriving.
- Offers vi-like keybindings together with alternative keymaps, mouse support, menus, and configurable themes.
- Filters rows by column, cell value, search match, or full-text search, with support for excluding matching data.
- Sorts by any column and groups records with pivot-style summaries and drill-down views.
- Extracts nested JSON fields into columns and parses unstructured logs with regular expressions.
- Provides buffer-based workflows so mutating actions create new views while preserving previous analysis steps.
- Can be used as a pipeline stage, writing the current buffer to stdout or running in batch mode without the TUI.
- Cross-platform support – runs under Linux and macOS.
Website: github.com/mpryor/nothing-less
Support:
Developer: Matt Pryor
License: MIT License
nless is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
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Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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