I wanted to really use and love jq but I always struggle with the syntax and debugging is a huge pain. I feel that better documentation of complex examples and chaining would get me over the line.

I did XSLT years ago and had far less of a problem learning my way around stylesheet syntax, and that was that bad old XML, don't you know. I was looking into Jolt just a week or two ago and ended up having a really rough time. I think if there was a more deliberate tutorial, it might be easier to learn. But the Javadocs and the hairball of example transformations were something I found confusing.

I came here to say exactly the same thing. jq is a great tool, very fast as well... and easy to deploy (just an executable with no library dependencies).

I was hoping jolt was a command line tool in the style of jq. I dont believe jq does transformations of json, only queries.

> I was hoping jolt was a command line tool in the style of jq. I dont believe jq does transformations of json, only queries.

I guess that depends on one's definition of transformation but:

    echo '{"hello": "world"}' | jq '{brave:{"new": .hello}}'

it also doesn't even require JSON input, meaning one could use it strictly for composing valid output JSON:

    # where -n = null input
    jq -n --arg foo bar '{"meet me": ("at the "+$foo)}'

I use it for transforming AWS responses all the time. I put jq up there with vim as one of the "must have" tools. In fact, the keys `%!jq .` are burned into my fingers because I type them a lot

_ed: fixed a mobile character replacement, added in the --arg flag I couldn't remember at the time_

It does! And you can do wonders with it. It has functions that make it capable of doing almost anything.

Also, my project https://requesthub.xyz/ relies entirely on the transformation capabilities of jq. See real world examples of jq transformations in this context: https://gist.github.com/fiatjaf/1d57953aa285b9bf5b51712268cf...

You should rather look at App::RecordStream. Last time I compared them jq was a poor cousin of App::RecordStream.