Why does GNOME Builder freeze when opening a 300 KB JSON file?

Applications
1

Hi everyone,

I’m using Ubuntu 26.04.

Today I exported some data from Claude AI. After extracting the ZIP archive, I got a JSON file that is about 313 KB in size.

When I try to open it in GNOME Builder, the application freezes and never finishes loading the file. I also tried opening the same file in GNOME Text Editor, and it freezes there as well.

However, the same file opens without any issues in VSCodium and even in nano.

My question is: Why are GNOME Builder and GNOME Text Editor unable to open a JSON file that’s only around 300 KB, while other editors handle it just fine? Is this a known limitation, or could it be a bug?

I’m still fairly new to understanding how editors and their underlying architecture work, so I may be missing something obvious.

Unfortunately, I can’t share the JSON file because it contains personal data. However, if there are any safe ways to inspect the file or gather debugging information without exposing its contents, I’d be happy to try them.

Thanks!

2

Does the file have extremely long lines — like thousands of characters per line? It’s known the text view struggles with that. Formatting your JSON file for humans should let you load it.

jq is useful for that. jq '.' file.json > pretty-file.json would pretty format the JSON file for you.

3

Yes, that was exactly the issue! The JSON was minified into one massive single line. I ran the jq command you suggested, and the file opens but still lags a lot, Thanks for the tip!