Coloring jq with less command

JQ is one of the best tools I frequently use. One good thing of jq is that it automatically print the JSON in pretty format with fine coloring. So I often use JQ command just for printing JSON in a pretty manner.

But this coloring can be disappeared when using a pipe to other commands such as less.

$ cat sample.json | jq . | less

This is the common case when we want to see the long length JSON file. How can we deal with it?

JQ has an option -C to keep the color even when the output goes to pipe or file. So if you want to ensure the coloring with less command, here is a helpful example.

$ cat sample.json | jq . -C | less -R