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.
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.
The stream keeps flowing.
Glimpse learns your fields after ~50 records and assigns stable colors so error.code always looks the same.
Filter expressions persist across reconnects. level=error AND service=auth-* survives a pod restart.
Last 10 MB of stream kept in memory. Scroll back without re-running the command.
Static Go binary, no runtime, no dependencies, ~6 MB.
# 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.
| Tool | Live | Stateful filters | Schema coloring | Replay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| jq | – | – | – | – |
| fblog | ✓ | – | – | – |
| lnav | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ |
| Glimpse | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Glimpse is at 0.4 — used daily by the maintainers, breaking changes still possible. v1.0 in Q3 2025 when the filter DSL stabilizes.
Built by people who got paged at 3 AM one too many times.