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Configuration files are user interfaces
We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be trivial to version control. Your pragmatic instinct is satisfied as well; the door remains open to creating a proper UI later, since it would be merely a graphical view of your configuration’s structured data.
Your pragmatic instinct is satisfied as well; the door remains open to creating a proper UI later, since it would be merely a graphical view of your configuration’s structured data. Instead, I’d like to give a shout out to an existing open source project, which in my eyes is an excellent real-world example of the “configuration is UI” vision. Besides the technical merits of KSON, I’m impressed by the driving force behind it: a small community of engineers has decided to bite the bullet and craft open software configuration tools that put humans first.
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