JSON Assistant for VS Code

Why I built the extension

Configurations, translation files, API responses: in many projects JSON files grow to thousands of lines. The code says t('checkout.payment.title') or config.app.database.host, and you hunt for the right spot in the file by hand, bracket by bracket. The other way round, it's almost impossible to tell whether a key is still used anywhere.

Search in VS Code only knows text, not paths. I wanted to type a path and land there, and jump from a key straight to where it's used in the code. That became JSON Assistant.

What it can do

Search Path: Press Ctrl+Alt+J (Mac: Cmd+Alt+J), enter a path like app.database.host, and the editor jumps there and highlights it. Array indexes like items[0] and keys with a dot in their name like a["literal.key"] work too.

JSON Outline: A view of its own in the sidebar shows the active file as a tree. The filter searches live, even for whole paths like engines.vscode.

Find References: Right-click a node, and the extension searches the workspace for places that use this path, such as config.a.b.c, config["a"]["b"], t('a.b.c') or _.get(obj, 'a.b.c'). It's a fast text search across all languages, not a full code analysis.

Duplicates: Duplicate keys, values and key-value pairs are highlighted in the editor and collected in a list of their own. One click copies a merge instruction for an AI to the clipboard that describes what is duplicated where.

Standard JSON and JSONC (JSON with comments) are supported.

Published with care

An extension runs inside the editor with access to your code, so trust mattered to me. Every version is tested automatically, including in a real VS Code instance, and published together with an SBOM (a list of all dependencies). Dependencies are checked for known vulnerabilities, and the OpenSSF Scorecard rates the repository every week.

Install

JSON Assistant on the Visual Studio Marketplace

The source code is open source (MIT): repository on GitHub; the .vsix files are also available under Releases.