JSONBuddy v1.0.0

JSONBuddy is a native macOS JSON editor built in AppKit — no SwiftUI, no WebView, no third-party runtime — so it stays responsive on documents that make browser-based tools stall.

New features

• Editor — syntax highlighting, line numbers, bracket matching and a live JSON path breadcrumb. Soft wrap keeps a 50 MB value readable without horizontal scrolling, and a wrapped line still shows a single line number.
• Transforms — format, minify, escape, unescape and recursive key sorting, each applied as one undoable step. Numbers keep their exact literal form, so 12345678901234567890 and 1e400 survive every transform unchanged.
• Folding — fold objects and arrays from the arrow beside the key, fold to a chosen depth, or fold the whole document. Long string values fold too, showing their length in place of the text.
• Tabs and comparison — several documents open at once, plus a semantic diff that formats and sorts both sides first, so a reordered key is not reported as a change.
• Find and replace — plain text and regular expressions, with matches counted in the background so a large document stays responsive.
• Repair suggestions — trailing commas, single quotes, comments and Python literals are detected in invalid JSON and can be fixed in one click.
• System integration — follows the system appearance and language (English and Simplified Chinese), and restores your open tabs and folds on relaunch.

Installation

Requires macOS 15 or later on Apple silicon.

Download JSONBuddy_macOS15_arm64_1.0.0.dmg, open it, and drag JSONBuddy to your Applications folder.

This build is ad-hoc signed rather than signed with a Developer ID and notarized, so macOS will refuse to open it the first time. Any one of these will let it through:

• Try to open it once and dismiss the warning, then go to System Settings → Privacy & Security and press Open Anyway.
• Right-click the app in Finder and choose Open, then confirm.
• Run xattr -cr /Applications/JSONBuddy.app in Terminal.