Tour of the window

The JSON Digger window shows one open document per tab. From top to bottom, a document’s window has the menu bar, the tab bar, the command bar, the view switcher, the search and query bars when they are open, the breadcrumb bar, the view itself with the panels and the activity rail on its right, and the status bar.

Welcome screen

With no tab open, the window shows the welcome screen: Open File, Fetch URL, and Workspaces buttons, a settings button, and your Recent files. Click a recent file to open it again, or a recent URL to fetch it again. To open the clipboard’s contents as a document, press Ctrl+V.

JSON Digger reopens the tabs of your last session when it starts, so you see the welcome screen only after you close every tab. See Workspaces and sessions.

You can drop files on the window at any time to open them.

Menu bar

The menus hold every command, grouped as File, Edit, View, Search, Node, and Help. On macOS they are in the system menu bar, with Settings and Quit in the JSON Digger menu. The Node menu acts on the node selected in the tree. Right-click a node to open a context menu with the commands that apply to it.

Tabs

Each open document has a tab. Hover over a tab to see the file’s full path. A dot on the tab marks Unsaved edits, or Changed on disk when another program changed the file. Middle-click a tab, or select its close button, to close it.

To show two tabs side by side, hover over an inactive tab and select Open beside the active tab. See Split panes and windows.

Command bar

The bar under the tabs has Open File and Search on the left, and Workspaces, Settings, and More actions (…, with Save As… and Capture View (SVG/PNG)…) on the right. In a narrow window, the buttons on the right show only their icons.

View switcher

The view switcher shows the same document in different ways. The views on offer depend on the file:

File	Views
JSON	Tree, Table, Columns, Graph, Chart, Analyze, Compare
NDJSON	Tree, NDJSON, Table, Chart
Plain text	Text only
Live stream	Stream only

A file with only one view has no switcher. While you edit a subtree, an Editor view joins the list. In a narrow window, the views become a Document view drop-down list.

Next to the views, the context bar holds the current view’s options, such as Minimap and Sort keys in the Tree view or Word wrap in the Text view. When you select nodes, it shows how many are selected, with Copy selected and Clear selection buttons.

Breadcrumb bar

In the Tree and Columns views, the breadcrumb bar shows the path from the root ($) to the selected node, for example $ › orders › [1] › status. Click a part of the path to select that node. When the node has siblings, the arrows on the right of the bar move to the previous or next sibling, and the counter shows the node’s position among them.

To copy a node’s path, use Copy Path instead. See Copy values and paths.

Activity rail and panels

The activity rail is the column of buttons on the right edge of the window. Each button opens a panel between the view and the rail. Select the button again, or the panel’s close button, to close it. Drag the panel’s edge to resize it.

Button	Shows
Properties	Details of the selected node. See Properties panel.
Statistics	Types and depths in the document. See Statistics and key frequency.
Anomalies	Missing and mixed-type fields, and lint warnings. See Anomalies and lint.
Schema validation	Violations of a JSON Schema. See Schema validation.
Key frequency	How often each key occurs. See Statistics and key frequency.
Value frequency	How often each value of a table column occurs. See Table view.
Search results	The list of search matches. See Search a document.
Highlighters	Saved searches that tint their matches. See Highlighters.
Pins	Pinned nodes. See Pins and bookmarks.
Bookmarks	Bookmarked nodes. See Pins and bookmarks.

The last four buttons show a count, for example the number of search matches. A new tab opens with no panel.

Status bar

The status bar describes the document, from left to right:

• The format (JSON, NDJSON, or Plaintext), the file size, and the encoding.
• The number of nodes. While JSON Digger is still indexing a large file, the counts grow until it finishes.
• For an NDJSON file, the number of records, and the number of lines that are not valid JSON.
• A progress indicator while JSON Digger works on the file in the background, for example indexing… 42%. During an edit, it has a button to cancel the edit.
• The number of lines.
• Malformed JSON @ byte N when the file is not valid JSON. See Open malformed JSON.
• The number of lint warnings. Click it to open the Anomalies panel.

On the right, the status bar shows the app’s memory use (RAM) and, in the Tree view, the selected row’s position, for example Row 12 of 4,096.

Command palette

The command palette runs any command by name. Press Ctrl+K, type part of the command’s name, and press Enter or click the command.

The palette lists only the commands that can run at that moment, with their shortcuts. For example, the editing commands appear only when the selected node can be edited. To see every shortcut, including those of commands that cannot run at the moment, see Keyboard shortcuts.