JSON pretty-printing [was: [4/4] ... (and maybe lei)]

[Eric Wong <e@80x24.org>]

Eric Wong <e@80x24.org> wrote:
>   [
>     { "name": "James Smythe", "email": "james@example.com" },
>     { "name": null, "email": "jane@example.com" },
>     { "name": "John Smith", "email": "john@example.com" }
>   ]

I might make JSON the default "lei q" output to the terminal or
pager when no mbox/Maildir/IMAP destination is specified.

Unfortunately, attempting JSON pretty-printing seems to add
excessive vertical white space and I can't easily match the
formatting above.  jq(1) can't seem to do what I want, either.

With the Perl JSON modules, the array of 3 hash tables would
either be all on one-line (not human friendly), or have
excessive vertical space:

   [
      {
         "email" : "james@example.com",
         "name" : "James Smythe"
      },
      {
         "email" : "jane@example.com",
         "name" : null
      },
      {
         "email" : "john@example.com",
         "name" : "John Smith"
      }
   ]

So maybe I'll bypass some of the structural/indentation stuff
and only rely on the JSON modules to properly quote strings.

I'm already doing that when outputting search results (similar
to "git log"), just on a per-smsg level to avoid building giant
arrays with 1000K search results in memory all at once.

JSON requiring keys (not just values) to be quoted also annoys
me a bit as being extra visual noise.