Interactive Viewer #
pq view opens a full-screen TUI for browsing Parquet data. It's also the default when you pass a file without a subcommand:
pq data.parquet # opens the viewer
pq view data.parquet # same thing
Navigation #
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
↑ / ↓ / j / k |
Scroll rows |
← / → / h / l |
Scroll columns |
Page Up / Page Down |
Jump by page |
Home / End |
Jump to first / last row |
q / Esc |
Quit |
When to use it #
The viewer is useful when you want to explore a file interactively: scroll through rows, check column values, and get a feel for the data. For scripted or piped workflows, use cat, head, or sql instead.
Remote files #
The viewer works with remote URLs too. pq fetches row groups on demand as you scroll:
pq "https://example.com/data.parquet"
pq "s3://my-bucket/data.parquet"
Try it with a real dataset — this Overture Maps places file is ~200 MB, but pq only fetches the bytes it needs:
pq "https://overturemapswestus2.blob.core.windows.net/release/2026-02-18.0/theme=places/type=place/part-00000-308cb36d-c529-4dc2-83bb-fe6b282a2b1a-c000.zstd.parquet"