JSON pretty print for TextMate 2.0

For quite some time now the great OS X text editor TextMate has gone open source in version 2.0 (version 1.0 can still be bought, though). It’s still in alpha but works quite well for me plus there’s a very active development community so that updates arrive on a nearly daily basis. (Yeah, I know about Sublime Text 2 and the ‚fight‘ between the two about which one’s the best. I like both. :-))

However, the other day I was using TextMate 2.0 and working on some Twitter API stuff and had to handle a rather large JSON response. Problem was: the returned JSON wasn’t nicely formatted and I wanted to study it. There is a JSON bundle in TextMate 2.0 and it contains a single command called „Reformat Selection“. I tried that on my long JSON string but the command never came back and did nothing and I had to kill TextMate. 🙁

A bit of googling brought this nifty little gem to light and I dove a bit into TextMate 2.0 bundle writing. Turns out: bringing that python quickie into TextMate is a piece of cake. Just open the bundle editor (Bundles>Edit Bundles…), select „JSON“ in the leftmost column, then „Menu Actions“ in the 2nd column. Press Cmd-N, select „Command“ and press the Create button. Then fill out the form and the script area according to this screenshot:

Of course, you can choose another keyboard shortcut or name of that command. The source code lines #1 and #2 are automatically generated so you only have to enter the 3rd line. Press Cmd-S to save that bundle and try your new command on you favorite JSON string. Worked like a charm for me. 🙂