Free Graphical JSON Editor

JSON is the native data format for data exchange with the REST APIs. In theory humans would never have to see the data format - so it’s very detailed and nested syntax would not create any problems. Ahhh, but it’s to tempting to not use it as a human authored specification file and the latest thing to use it as a hand coded input format is the new Azure automation known as Azure Resource Manager (ARM). I was on a quest to find a Free JSON editor that let me edit not just view the JSON data in a tree view. That quest ended when I found…

JSONEdit which allows you many handy editing options in the tree view. This includes copying entire sub-trees, deleting all sibbling nodes and validation when you switch to text view. It also has syntax highlighting and collapsing - many text editors that support JSON syntax highlighting do not support collapsing.

One notable limitation is that it only works with ANSI and UTF-8 WITHOUT BOM file encoding. This isn’t easy to remedy because the developer toolkit used to build it as a single file application (portable, simple to install) would need to be replaced and all the code refactored. If you try to load an unsupported format you will either get an error saying “Failed to parse text. Line 1, Column 1” and some garbage on the first line in text view or just the familar ‘yp’ in the text view. You can use Notepad++ to convert to ANSI or UTF-8 Without BOM.

You can find JSON edit by visiting [tomeko.net] (http://tomeko.net/software/JSONedit/)

I have also created a Chocolatey Package. It is not out of moderation yet, but you can view it here: https://chocolatey.org/packages/jsonedit and install it with this command line:

choco install jsonedit