Format JSON straight from your clipboard on your Mac

The detour you stopped noticing

JSON arrives minified because that is how it travels. A response body in a terminal, a payload glued into one line of a log, a webhook example someone pasted into Slack — all of it lands on your clipboard as an unbroken wall, and none of it is readable until something formats it.

So you have a routine. Maybe it is a browser tab you keep open on a formatter site, which means the response body you were debugging is now in a form field on someone else’s page — fine for a fixture, less fine for the one that has a customer’s email in it. Maybe it is pbpaste | jq ., which is genuinely good and still costs you a terminal, a shell, and a second copy back out when you want to paste the formatted version somewhere else. Either way it is a detour, and you take it several times a day.

The observation Rakkun is built on is that the detour is unnecessary. Something on your Mac already saw the clipboard change. It could have done the formatting then.

What the panel gives you

The preview is pretty-printed and syntax-highlighted, with the palette checked against WCAG AA contrast in both light and dark appearances — a small thing until you have spent an afternoon reading pale gray strings.

The actions are where the time actually goes. ↩ pastes it formatted into the app you came from. ⌘C offers the other forms you might have wanted instead: minified again, or escaped as a string so it can go straight into source code. And Copy value at path… takes a path like order.customer.email and hands you just that value — which is what you were going to do by hand with a mouse and a lot of squinting.

⌘T transforms the clip itself: trim it, change its case, escape or unescape it. ⌘E edits the content in place and re-detects it on save, so a fragment that was one bracket away from being valid JSON becomes JSON as soon as you fix the bracket.

It only fires when the clip is the document

Detection is deliberately narrow. A clip is JSON when the clip is a JSON document — not when a JSON-looking fragment happens to sit inside a paragraph of log output. The reason is that ↩ has to be safe: an action that reformats your clipboard should never have to guess which half of the text you meant. When detection is not certain, the clip stays plain text with the full search, pinning and paste behavior, and nothing is silently rewritten.

The parsers are also total. Malformed input never crashes anything — a document that does not parse falls back to plain text, every time.

And the payload stays on your Mac

The response body you just formatted probably has real data in it. Rakkun ships with no network entitlement at all, so macOS itself prevents the app from opening a connection. Values that look like API keys or tokens inside that JSON are recognized and masked in the interface, so a screen share does not leak one while you are reading the rest.