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TOML
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2026
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I've never gotten to be good friends with
toml. I've never liked that the properties of some thing can be defined all over the place, and I've definitely never liked that it's so hard to read nested properties.JSONis my friend.They serve largely different use-cases. JSON is good for serializing data. TOML is good for configuration.
.vscodewould like a word.But besides that, I just can't understand why even someone that hates
JSONwould chooseTOMLoverYAMLfor a config file.Most of production failures in my company in last few years come from people making mistakes in yaml indentation.
To me, that makes it sound like you're writing too much and too complex yaml files manually, and/or that you don't have good enough CI to catch invalid configurations. Unless, of course, you have very few prod failures overall, and the few that happen are due to yaml indentation, which I still think is a bit weird, since an invalid config caused by incorrect indentation should ideally be caught at compile time (if you're generating code from the yaml) or by some linter or something (if you're using it for config).
VSCode is Electron, i.e. a webpage, so it's not hugely surprising that they opted for the natively supported JavaScript Object Notation. ~~And also shows that they don't care for using the right tool for the job to begin with.~~
Personally, I much prefer TOML over YAML, because it does not have significant whitespace, and because you can read the spec in a reasonable amount of time. It just has so much less complexity, while still covering the vast majority of use-cases perfectly well.
I'll agree that significant whitespace can be a PITA (one of the reasons I prefer json over yaml), but at the same time I think improper or lacking indentation hurts readability even more than significant whitespace. Toml basically encourages a completely flat structure, where objects and sub-objects are defined all over the place. At that point, I much prefer an enforced structure with whitespace.
I can understand the sentiment and would 100% agree for programming languages.
But personally I actually like that it encourages a flat structure, because you do not want to be yakshaving the structure of your config file. Too much nesting means you will sooner or later run into configuration keys being nested under the wrong category, because your project context changed over time.
And well, as I've argued in a few other comments already, I think non-techie users have a disproportionally simpler time when no nesting is used. They understand the concept of a heading and then just adding a line underneath the appropriate heading is really intuitive.
You can just tell them to add the line
certificate="/tmp/cert.crt"under[network.tls]and they will find a line in their config file which actually reads[network.tls]and they can just paste that line as-is.With nesting, they'd need to add it under here:
Which means:
It's not even that I'm completely enamored with TOML, but this aspect is certainly growing on me...
JSON5 or even JSONC are as good as TOML for configuration, if not better.
INI can be nicer for non-techies due to its flat structure. However, TOML seems to be in an awkward spot: either I want flat approachable (I'll pick INI) or not (I'll pick JSONC). Why would I want a mix?
Well, you can still decide how much of the TOML features you actually use in your specific application. For example, I'm currently involved in two projects at $DAYJOB where we read TOML configurations and we don't make use of the inline tables that OP memes about in either of them.
Ultimately, the big advantage of TOML over INI is that it standardizes all kinds of small INI extensions that folks have come up with over the decades. As such, it has a formal specification and in particular only one specification.
You can assume that you can read the same TOML file from two different programming languages, which you cannot just assume for INI.
I can't really decide what extensions my users will face, once they are supported. Therefore too many extensions seems bad to me.
We just document that this is how you write the config file:
And that seems straightforward enough. Yeah, technically users can opt to use inline tables or raw strings or whatever, but they don't have to.
Configs are often shared, just to explain my reservations with TOML. For my project, I used INI instead.