I was constantly dealing with JSON from KOOTD API responses. Especially when making YouTube Shorts, I had to copy individual items one by one, and manually dragging to select each time was maddening.
Existing tools only let you copy everything at once, or were too barebones. What I wanted was to copy just one specific value. So I built it.
What It Is
Paste in JSON and it displays as a tree. Each value has a copy button right next to it — one click and done. Nested objects can be collapsed and expanded. You can sort by key name too.
How I Actually Use It
I work with JSON data a lot when making Kortress YouTube Shorts. I used to manually drag-select each item to copy it. Now it's one button click. It's also handy when checking API responses during development.
What Tripped Me Up
At first I tried just displaying the raw JSON, but once nesting got deep, readability went to zero. Switching to a tree view with collapse/expand made a huge difference.
The copy feature originally only worked for the entire JSON blob. But in practice, I almost always wanted to copy a specific value. So I added a copy button to every value. The Clipboard API makes it straightforward.
When I tested on mobile, the tree view buttons were too small to tap. Had to increase button sizes and adjust the layout for mobile.
Started out as a simple "JSON formatter" but what I actually needed was "a tool that makes copying individual values easy."
Want to try it? Check out the JSON Tools.