TIL

I often get large JSON files which contain no newlines or indentation. I’d like to look at these reasonably in neovim, but it’s been cumbersome until today.

TL;DR: You can replace the contents of the buffer with output formatted by jq with one command: :%!jq .

Other techniques I’ve used, from worse to lest worse:

1. Replacing every , with ,\r and then using = to auto-indent the lines. This rarely works well.
2. Using jq externally. cat input.json | jq . > output.json. This kind of sucks because you now have 2 files…

Now, you can open the file in neovim and type :%!jq .. Magically, the buffer will be nicely formatted.

Roughly, this is entering a command, :, on the whole buffer, %, then executing a shell command, !, of jq . the most basic jq invocation. Presumably, you could entry and jq filter command to form some other JSON instead of just formatting the given JSON, but I’ll leave that up to you to play with.

Happy formatting!!

– Chris