GUIDE · VIEWS

See your data four ways —
then focus on the part that matters.

Every file opens as an interactive tree, but that's one of four views over the same document. And when a file is too big to take in at once, you can reframe any node as the root and work on just that subtree.

The four views

Switch between them from the toolbar. They all read the same parsed document — no reload, no re-parse — and switching tabs keeps your place.

Tree

The interactive collapsible tree — the default for JSON. Expand or collapse any node or whole subtree, toggle line numbers, and it stays smooth on huge files because it's virtualized.

Raw

The document text in its native format — JSON pretty-printed, YAML as YAML, TOON as TOON — with themed syntax colors. The default view when you open a YAML or TOON file.

Schema

An inferred JSON Schema of the data, rendered in the same tree. It merges what it sees across every record, so a field present in most but missing in a few shows up as optional.

Graph

A node-link graph, paged lazily from the root outward, with a minimap and level-of-detail zoom — the fastest way to trace relationships across nested objects.

Schema and Graph need the whole document parsed in memory, so on a very large file that streams in, they may be unavailable until you narrow it down — which is exactly what rooting is for.

Open as root: focus on a subtree

Right-click any object or array and choose Open as root. QDev reframes that node as the document root and re-opens it as a standalone document — so the tree, search, jq, schema, and graph all now operate on just that subtree.

The right-click context menu on a tree node, showing “Open as root” and “Filter to this path”. — Right-click a container node → Open as root.

A breadcrumb trail appears while you're drilled in — root › teams › [0] — and every crumb is clickable to climb back out. The Exit control jumps straight back to the top.

The drill-in breadcrumb trail (root › teams › [0]) with a trailing Exit button. — The drill trail — click any ancestor, or Exit to return to the whole document.

● WHY IT MATTERS ON BIG FILES

Because rooting re-opens only that node's bytes, a subtree of a huge streamed file can come back small enough to regain Schema, Graph, and AI — capabilities the full file was too large for. It's the streaming-safe way to get full power on a slice.

Filter to this path

The same context menu offers Filter to this path, which runs a jq query for the node's path instead of re-rooting. It keeps you in the full document's context, but needs the file small enough to run jq over. Rooting is the better move when the file is too big for that; filtering is handy when you want a jq expression you can tweak.

Two more menu items move a node between views without re-rooting — View in Graph and View in Tree — and Copy pathgives you the node's location as jq, a JSON Pointer, or a dotted path.

Open a file and dig in.

Four views, one document, and a root you can move wherever you're looking.

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See your data four ways —then focus on the part that matters.

The four views

Open as root: focus on a subtree

Filter to this path

See your data four ways —
then focus on the part that matters.