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. The color situation is nonexistent.…