The ChrysoKit JSON Formatter looks simple at first glance: paste in JSON, see it pretty-printed. But there are ten features hiding in plain sight that most people never touch. Here is a quick tour.
1. Use the right mode for the job
Four modes ship with the formatter: Format for human-readable output, Minify to strip whitespace, Validate to check structure without changing it, and Tree for browsing large objects.
2. Auto-repair almost-valid JSON
Trailing commas, single quotes, unquoted keys, comments. Auto-repair handles all of them without complaint. Toggle it on, paste your slightly-broken payload, and out comes valid JSON.
{
// a comment
name: 'Chryso',
tags: ['blog', 'launch',],
}That input above? Fixed automatically.
3. Tree view for big objects
When the payload is hundreds of lines deep, plain text becomes painful. Switch to Tree view to collapse and expand branches, jump straight to a key, or copy a sub-tree as standalone JSON.
4. Deep diff between two payloads
Paste payload A on the left and payload B on the right. The diff highlights additions in green, removals in red, and changed values in amber. Works at any depth, not just top-level.
Heads up. Diffs of giant arrays without keys can be slow. If yours is huge, format it first to confirm it parses, then diff just the relevant slice.
5. Five built-in converters
One click takes you between JSON and YAML, XML, CSV, TOML or query strings. Round-tripping is lossless for the basic types and warns you when something is not representable.
6. Sort keys for stable diffs
Two payloads with the same data can fail equality just because their keys are in a different order. Hit "Sort keys" before diffing or committing and the noise disappears.
7. Choose your indent
Two-space, four-space, or tabs. Whatever your team uses. The formatter remembers the last setting locally so you do not have to set it again next time.
8. Keyboard shortcuts
Six shortcuts cover almost everything you do in the tool:
| Shortcut | Action |
|---|---|
Cmd / Ctrl + Enter | Format |
Cmd / Ctrl + M | Minify |
Cmd / Ctrl + K | Clear input |
Cmd / Ctrl + L | Copy output |
Cmd / Ctrl + D | Toggle tree view |
Cmd / Ctrl + / | Toggle auto-repair |
9. Drop a file in
Files up to roughly 50 MB drag-and-drop onto the input area. The formatter streams large files instead of trying to load them into memory all at once.
10. It is private
Every operation runs in your browser. Nothing leaves your machine. Paste production data without the usual anxiety.
If a tool wants you to upload your data to use it, that tool has a business model problem, not you.
That is the kit. Go format some JSON: open the JSON Formatter →