Formatting JSON in Kate - KDE Editor

Some years ago, I wrote a post on Formatting XML in Kate - KDE Editor. This one  below is for JSON format. Like the XML one this one also makes use of a tool installed on your machine and is invoked from Kate as a filter.

TLDR; 

Kate is one awesome editor ( If you don't like Vim for its 'CLI'ness )

When working from the command line we can use a handy tool 'jq' to format JSON files and pretty print them. Well, the good news is we can use the same from within Kate as well

But it is a tedious task to use it when you have some content in Kate ( more so if it is an unsaved file ) and want to format it.

Incase, you don't have jq installed, simply hit
sudo apt-get install jq
and that will install it for you.

If you use jq you would do something like this,

• Save File ( MySavedFile.xml )
• Go to Command Line
• cat MySavedFile.txt | jq '.' - > MySavedFile.txt

and then reload our file in Kate.

If you wish to remain in Kate and get this done then you would need to do,

• Select text ( Complete or Partial )
• Hit 'Ctrl + \'  or go to Tools -> Filter Text
• Incase your Kate does not have the option for 'Filter Text' under tools, you just need to enable the 'Text Filter' plugin.
• Go to Settings -> Plugin -> Enable 'Text Filter' and you are done.
• Type 'jq '.' -' and Voilà! we have a formatted JSON
• Incase, you don't wish to modify the existing text, make sure you select 'Copy the result instead of pasting it'

• Another good thing is that Kate caches the jq command in the text filter so you don't have to type it in again and again. 

Tested with ,

Kate: 19.12.3

Qt: 5.12.8
KDE Development Platform: 5.68.0

on Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS