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Introducing JSON Hero: an open-source, beautiful JSON viewer for the web that lets you browse, search and navigate your JSON files at speed. πŸš€

Published
β€’3 min read
Introducing JSON Hero: an open-source, beautiful JSON viewer for the web that lets you browse, search and navigate your JSON files at speed. πŸš€
E

Founder at Trigger.dev, the open source background job framework. Creator of jsonhero.io.

Programming on the web in 2022:

So we set out to create a new tool to make reading and understanding JSON easier and more efficient than a Wall-O-Text:

brandbird (8).png

It's too easy to get lost in a deeply nested document, and you end up having to resort to manually collapsing parts of the hierarchy so you can more easily focus on subset of the JSON you care about. Unfortunately, this makes comparing related values difficult and time consuming.

The macOS Finder solves some of these issues by providing a handy Column View

Screen Shot 2022-04-22 at 10.15.45.png

If we apply those same principles to a JSON document, it might look something like this:

features-columnview.gif

It has all the features you'd expect: keyboard navigation, path bar, history. Try it now on jsonhero.io

It also has a nifty feature that allows you to "hold" a descendent selected and travel up through the hierarchy, and then move between siblings and view the different values found at that path. It's hard to describe, but here is an animation to help demonstrate:

features-traversewithcontext.gif

The smart preview pane

We built a preview pane that displays more information about the current selection. It can automatically infer the content of the selected item and give you intelligent previews for dates and times, websites, tweets, youtube videos, colors, and more:

features-preview-imageurls.png

Easily see all the related values across your entire JSON document for a specific field, including any undefined or null values:

features-relatedvalues.gif

Search everything

Looking for something specific? Use CMD+K and quickly pull up the fuzzy search palette. Search for object keys, paths, values, and even formatted values (e.g. searching for "Dec" will find "2021-12-01T13:56:12Z")

features-search.gif

Keeping with tradition

Column view might not be the right view for all occasions, so we built a classic JSON tree view as well

Tree View

We built this tree view from the ground-up to be fast and scale to large documents, making use of the great react-virtual project to ensure buttery-smooth scrolling. It's also a ARIA-compliant tree view and has all the keyboard shortcuts you'd expect for quickly traversing and collapsing/expanding content.

We also included a CodeMirror 6-powered editor that keeps the nice previews and related values you get from the sidebar as you move around the document:

Editor View

Automatically inferred JSON Schema

Get a head-start on creating a JSON Schema document from your JSON using our automatically inferred schema generator, powered by @jsonhero/schema-infer:

Screen Shot 2022-04-22 at 10.48.31.png

Sharing is caring

Easily share the link to your JSON and even link to a specific part of the document

Screen Shot 2022-04-22 at 10.50.16.png

IMPORTANT: Anyone who has the URL to your JSON will be able to view it, and all of JSON Hero is public. If you are using jsonhero.io, your data is stored in Cloudflare KV.

100% Open Source

If you'd like to contribute or run JSON Hero yourself, feel free to join us on our GitHub. JSON Hero is a remix React app that runs on Cloudflare Workers, written in Typescript.

πŸ‘‰ Please give us a star on GitHub to get the latest updates 🌟

Comments (13)

Join the discussion
M

Great

D

Wow!! This is amazing, and useful... I like the smart preview... but too much nested JSON would give users a hardtime to figure out the root I guess. But that's something we have to deal with as the JSON structure is nested... But yeah!! great work!!

B

Unbelievably useful for web and data folks alike!

D

WOW, AMAZING UI! Great job! Reminds me a lot of Apollo's GraphQL Playground lol

M

Great product! Certainly very useful 🎊

1
V

You are all true heroes. Oath!! This is very cool.

1
A
Amy Stout3y ago

This looks way cool! Might be a dumb question; but is this Mac only?

Thank you!

E

Not a dumb question! It runs on the web so should work just fine on Windows or Linux, depending on the browser you use. Let us know if you have any issues!

1
A
Amy Stout3y ago

Eric Allam Ok great thank you! Can't wait to give it a try!

D

Looks really good. Good job! An IDE integration would be pretty neat.

1
E

Thanks! So far we do have an integration with VS Code that allows you to quickly open some JSON in JSON Hero:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JSONHero.jsonhero-vscode

S

Congrats , love it Will 🌟 the repo for sure

1
W

Looks cool to check out!

1

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