v0.4 · stream-aware

Glimpse

Stream-aware JSON visualization for your terminal.

Glimpse turns the firehose of structured logs and event streams into something a human can actually parse — without leaving the terminal.

Why we built this

If you've ever piped kubectl logs -f into jq and immediately regretted it, this is for you.

JSON logs are great for machines and miserable for humans. jq formats one record at a time. Your terminal becomes a wall of green. You're three minutes into an outage and you can't find the field you need.

Glimpse stays out of your way until you need it — then folds, filters, colors, and reshapes the stream live.

Features

Live folding. Collapse any path in real time. The stream keeps flowing.
Schema-aware coloring. Glimpse learns your fields after ~50 records and assigns stable colors so error.code always looks the same.
Stateful filters. Filter expressions persist across reconnects. level=error AND service=auth-* survives a pod restart.
Replay buffer. Last 10 MB of stream kept in memory. Scroll back without re-running the command.
One binary. Static Go binary, no runtime, no dependencies, ~6 MB.

Quick start

# install
brew install glimpse-stream/tap/glimpse

# pipe in any JSON stream
kubectl logs -f deploy/api -n prod | glimpse

# with a saved filter
glimpse --filter "level >= warn" --color-by service

Press / to filter, f to fold, ? for everything else.

How it compares

Tool	Live	Stateful filters	Schema coloring	Replay
`jq`	-	-	-	-
`fblog`	✓	-	-	-
`lnav`	✓	✓	-	✓
Glimpse	✓	✓	✓	✓

Status

Glimpse is at 0.4 — used daily by the maintainers, breaking changes still possible. v1.0 in Q3 2025 when the filter DSL stabilizes.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Built by people who got paged at 3 AM one too many times.