Inspect. Navigate. Understand.

A modern, terminal-based explorer for JSON and YAML files. Built for developers who work with real data in real environments.

Twig is a high-performance terminal UI for exploring JSON and YAML files interactively. It turns deeply nested data into a navigable tree, letting you search, jump, and inspect complex structures without piping commands together or scrolling endlessly.

Twig is designed for understanding data, not editing it. It fills the gap between cat/less (no structure) and heavy IDEs (too slow/GUI-based), making it perfect for production logs, Kubernetes manifests, and large API responses.

The modern, fast, and reliable way to install Python tools.

# 1. Install uv (if needed)
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# 2. Install Twig
uv tool install twg

pipx install twg

pip install twg

uv tool uninstall twg

Explore a file:

twg data.json
# or
twg config.yaml

Fix broken JSON: Automatically repair common errors (trailing commas, unquoted keys) or sanitize NaN/Infinity values:

twg --fix bad.json -o clean.json

Pretty Print:

twg -p large.json

• 📂 Multi-Format: Native support for JSON and YAML.
• 👀 Read-Only by Design: Safely explore production data, logs, and configs without accidental edits.
• 🔍 Deep Search: Fast fuzzy search across keys and values (e.g. Pull matches imagePullPolicy).
• 🧭 Tree-Based Navigation: Navigate large, deeply nested files without losing context.
• 🎨 Themes: Includes Catppuccin Mocha (default) and Solarized Dark.
• ⚡ Performance-Focused: Designed to handle large files efficiently with a low memory footprint.

Many real-world files — API responses, K8s manifests, Terraform state — contain sensitive information. Pasting them into web-based viewers is a security risk.

Existing CLI tools like jq are powerful for transformation but can be unintuitive for interactive exploration. Twig focuses purely on the latter:

• Runs entirely locally
• Works well over SSH and headless environments
• Optimized for reading, not mutation

Twig is not:

• An editor.
• A replacement for jq.
• A streaming log viewer.

Twig is built using Textual and uses SQLite with FTS5 for indexing. This allows instant search and navigation even for large files.

Benchmarks:

We welcome contributions! Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for architecture details and setup instructions.