JSONaire is a native macOS app for opening and browsing huge JSON files, the kind that make Chrome DevTools, VS Code, or Electron viewers hang or crash. It memory-maps files instead of loading them into RAM, so a 4GB document opens in milliseconds and stays smooth at any depth. Includes native window tabs, fast search, copy in any format, and a table view for object arrays. Free up to 100MB, Pro unlocks unlimited size and all themes.
Hey Product Hunt 👋
I've used Dadroit for a while for opening huge JSON files (API dumps, logs, ML datasets), and it's genuinely good at the core job. But it's built once to run across Windows, macOS, and Linux, so there were a few very Mac specific things I kept wanting:
- Real macOS window tabs (drag a tab out into its own window, merge windows back, use the system tab overview) instead of an in-app tab bar
- A one time purchase instead of a subscription for something I'd use maybe a few times a month
- Native light/dark themes that actually match how I use the rest of my Mac
- Something that felt like it belonged on my Mac, not just running on it
So I built JSONaire from scratch, specifically for macOS, with a focus on staying fast and light even on very large files. In practice, files well into the gigabytes open in a fraction of a second and stay smooth while you scroll, search, and expand nested data.
One thing that kept slowing me down: with a large JSON file, scrolling through a deeply nested tree to find one specific object in a big array, or to compare a field across thousands of entries, is painful. So I added a "View as Table" mode for arrays of objects, it lays the array out as rows and columns and lets you filter by a cell's value directly, instead of manually expanding node after node looking for what you need.
*(Actual speed and memory use depend on how the JSON is structured, not just file size. A flat file with a few large values behaves very differently from one with millions of small, deeply nested values.)*
It's macOS 14+, free up to 100MB files with 2 themes, and Pro is a one time lifetime purchase that removes the size cap and unlocks all themes.
Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's hit the limits of Dadroit or a browser based viewer on a genuinely large file. What's the biggest JSON file you've had to actually work with, and what broke?
Savvyshot