This page covers how each command picks between a table and JSON, and what each product wraps its data in.

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Table or JSON, chosen for you

Every command decides its output format the same way: an explicit --json, --yaml or --table flag wins; otherwise stdout being a terminal means a table, and stdout being a pipe or a file means JSON. You never have to remember to add --json in a script — redirecting or piping the output already gets it.

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Flags

These flags exist on every command in all three CLIs: --json, --yaml and --table are mutually exclusive; passing more than one is a usage error. Moodle adds one flag the other two don’t have: --pretty, which indents JSON with two spaces. Without it, moodle’s JSON is compact (no indentation), on the assumption that most JSON consumers are scripts, not readers. edstem and ontrack JSON is pretty-printed by default, without needing a flag for it.

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Output shape differs by product

Moodle wraps list results in a named object plus a total count: { "units": [...], "total": 3 }, { "activities": [...], "total": 12 }, { "threads": [...], "total": 5 }. A single-item result nests under its own name too, such as { "thread": { "id": ..., "posts": [...], "posts_total": 4 } }.Empty strings, empty arrays and empty objects are stripped from the output entirely — a field that would be "" or [] is absent rather than present and empty. total: 0 is how you tell “nothing matched” from “the field wasn’t populated.”Dates carry both a human ISO-8601 string with a UTC offset and the raw epoch seconds, as a pair of fields: due ("2026-09-28T23:59:00+10:00") alongside due_at (the epoch integer); created alongside time_created; start/start_at, end/end_at. Use the _at field for arithmetic and the plain-named field for display.
This is a real difference between the products, not an inconsistency to work around — when you write a script that reads more than one of these CLIs, check whether you’re parsing an object with a named key or a bare array.

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Tables fit the terminal

A table’s column widths start at whatever the widest cell needs. When a width is passed in (the terminal’s column count), the widest column is shaved a character at a time — with truncated cells ending in … — until the table fits, down to a floor of 8 characters per column; no column is ever dropped outright, because a missing column is a silent hole in the data where a truncated one is at least visible as truncated.

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Color

Color follows the output stream, not a flag you have to remember: a pipe never gets ANSI escape codes (the control sequences a terminal reads as color), matching the text a person would see if they ran the same command through --no-color. NO_COLOR (any non-empty value) and FORCE_COLOR=0/FORCE_COLOR=false disable color outright; FORCE_COLOR (any other value) or CLICOLOR_FORCE forces it on even when the stream isn’t a detected terminal. --no-color on the command line does the same as NO_COLOR. Table cells and status words are colored by the shared theme when color is on — see Humans and agents for what each color means.

Errors and exit codes

How a failed command’s JSON differs from a successful one.