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CONL: "Markdown" for your config files


In my day job building software, I have to interact with complex configuration files continually. They are (as of 2025) typically in one of three formats: JSON-with-comments, YAML, or TOML.

The aggressively small feature set of CONL makes it trivial for you to build your own (you can probably even one-shot-vibe-code the whole thing if you’re into that kind of stuff). If you want to port it to your favorite language, there is a more formal spec, and a re-usable test suite of example CONL documents with their equivalent JSON. In practice software configuration is frequently a nested tree, which JSON and YAML handle very nicely; so I wanted to keep that ability.

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CONL

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