Now I Know That Technical Thing Too

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 t...

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 ' xmllint ' to format XML files using its --format option. 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 xmllint installed, simply hit sudo apt-get install libxml2-utils and that will install it for you. If you use xmllint you would do something like this, Save File ( MySavedFile.xml ) Go to Command Line cat MySavedFile.txt | xmllint --format - > 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 F...