A daily developer toolkit that never opens a tab to elsewhere.com

The utility-tab problem

Every developer has the same six tabs open: a JSON formatter, a Base64 encoder, a regex tester, a JWT decoder, a hash calculator, and a diff viewer. They live in Google searches because the URL is forgettable, and half of them ship ads that animate while you're trying to focus.

The bigger problem is that you paste real production data into them. Tokens you grabbed from a header. JSON containing customer IDs. JWTs that haven't been rotated yet. The disclaimer that says "runs locally" sometimes does. It's not always easy to tell which.

The browser-only alternative

SnapToolz ships every one of those utilities as a static page. The whole site is a static export — no backend exists to receive your data. You can verify in DevTools that the Network tab stays empty when you paste a JWT in.

Same UX you're used to (paste in, formatted output out, copy with one click), with two upgrades: a shared keyboard-first interaction model across all the tools, and the SnapToolz browser extension that lets you right-click a selection on any page and send it straight to the matching tool, pre-populated.

The set

• JSON Formatter — pretty-print, minify, sort keys, validate with precise error messages.
• Base64 — text and file modes, encode and decode, with file-type detection on decode.
• URL Encoder — encode/decode percent-encoded URL components and full URLs.
• Hash Generator — SHA-256, SHA-1, SHA-512, MD5 on text or files.
• Regex Tester — live match highlighting, capture groups, flag toggles.
• JWT Decoder — split into header, payload, signature; decoded claims with exp/iat formatted as dates.
• Text Diff — side-by-side and inline; line-level and character-level granularity.
• Markdown — live preview, GFM extensions, syntax-highlighted code blocks.

Right-click context menus

Install the SnapToolz browser extension and the workflow shortens dramatically. Highlight a JSON blob in a console log → right-click → SnapToolz → Format as JSON. The formatter opens in a new tab with your text already in the input. Same for Base64 (highlight → encode/decode), hash (highlight → SHA-256), regex test, word count.

The extension uses two permissions: contextMenus (for the right-click items) and storage (to remember the base URL — useful if you self-host). No host permissions, no <all_urls>, no telemetry. The selected text is passed via URL hash, which never leaves your browser even on slow networks.

Pairing it with the scratchpad

The new Scratchpad tool gives you persistent local storage for the snippets you keep re-using: a sample JWT, the regex you wrote for parsing logs last month, the JSON template you start from when scaffolding a new endpoint. Snippets are stored in IndexedDB on your machine — nothing syncs.

Combine the two and the loop becomes: paste production data into the scratchpad, route it to the matching utility via the smart-paste detector (which recognises JSON, Base64, hex, UUIDs, JWTs and offers to open the right tool), iterate, save what's worth keeping.

What this isn't

It isn't trying to be VS Code. There's no language server, no Git integration, no project tree. The point is the opposite — a set of single-purpose utilities you can finish using and close, without ever signing in or installing anything.

For deep work in a real editor, your editor is better. For the ten-second utility tasks that interrupt deep work, this is the friction-free alternative to the six ad-laden tabs.