[agumonkey]

My usual thought on this is that I don't want to get stuck at ctrlp ctrlf level. I always pick a tool that gives an intermediate expressiveness level even if it means a bit more efforts.. especially if it's not gui because I can reuse and compose it.

For instance jq falls too far on the capabilities curve. It's a nuclear weapon but it's almost a programming language and I never can keep the operators in mind (even though I loved the idea at first).

[isityettime]

> it's almost a programming language

It is a programming language. That thing you write between single quotation marks when you invoke jq is a program. (And like with other programming languages, it's often useful to write your jq programs to files instead of always writing them inline in the shell.)

I love jq, though. It provides an extremely good language for its task, even if I often have to take a look at the manual when writing an interesting jq program.

[iLemming]

fwiw, Clojure pretty much replaced jq in my toolbelt. Dealing with EDN is so much gratifying - it's almost twice more compact than JSON, it's far more readable; filtering, grouping, sorting, slicing data is so much more straightforward and actually composable, not to mention that I get to do that interactively, directly from my editor.