It may be fine for hello-world stuff, but how would one JSONPath this?

  echo '[{"name":"_skip"},{"name":"alpha"},{"name":"_other"}' | \
    jq '[ .[] | select(.name|test("^_.*")|not) | . ]'

The same is roughly true for JMESPath, also, although at least it does actually try to allow projections and some limited functions

Is ".*" necessary? I think "^_" should be enough.

I believe like this.

  $[?(@.name =~ /[^_].*/)]

Interesting, I only knew about <https://goessner.net/articles/JsonPath/index.html> which makes no reference to =~ nor any such // syntax but it seems there's an IETF draft that is (a) an actual specification (b) includes more modern stuff like what you used: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-ietf-jsonpath-base-07....

And, while whatever is powering https://jsonpath.com/ does honor your syntax, albeit with an absolutely useless result:

    [
      {
        "name": -1
      },
      {
        "name": -1
      },
      {
        "name": -1
      }
    ]

I found that `pip install jsonpath-ng` does not accept it nor mention it <https://github.com/h2non/jsonpath-ng/tree/v1.5.3?tab=readme-...> so I think it's out on the bleeding edge or something

I hadn't seen this before. At a quick glance, the syntax looks fine. Though I don't know what command line utility I'd need to use it. It makes me wonder how hard a translator from jq syntax to jsonpath would be... Then we could have our cake and eat it too.