How do I keep colors when piping "jq" output to "less"?
It is jq that is suppressing the colours. From the man page
o --color-output / -C and --monochrome-output / -M: By default, jq outputs colored JSON if writing to a terminal.You can force it to produce color even if writing to a pipe or a fileusing -C, and disable color with -MSo, just use:
jq -C "." /tmp/myfile.json | less -Rand it will output colours regardless. The less command doesn't need the -R switch on my version, but I believe it does on older versions. If you see the ESC... codes, you will need that switch.