In another post I showed you some tricks you can do from command mode. If you aren’t familiar with it, most standard Linux distros ship with json_pp, which is a pretty-printer for JSON. Today I discovered this tool makes for a fantastic quick tool in Vim when you want to sharpen up some JSON. It can take output like this:

{"rofl":{"copters":["red","blue","gree"]}, "lol": 24.6}

And turns it into this:

{
   "rofl" : {
      "copters" : [
         "red",
         "blue",
         "gree"
      ]
   },
   "lol" : 24.6
}

Using the following command

:1,1!json_pp

In this case the 1,1 part of the command is the range of lines that you want to send to json_pp. This also works with visual mode as well. After selecting the text you want, if you press : it will pre-populate the correct range for you!