UNIC Config for Visual Studio Code

Language support for UNIC, the Universal Configuration Format, in Visual Studio Code. The extension works with *.unic files and does not require Go or a separately installed CLI.

Features

Syntax highlighting for fields, attributes, lists, maps, strings, comments, booleans, and numbers.
Live syntax diagnostics for malformed delimiters, unterminated strings, missing field terminators, and invalid map entries.
Canonical document formatting: four-space indentation, normalized whitespace, safe string quoting, and preserved comments. Invalid documents are not modified by the formatter.
Snippets for fields, blocks, blocks with attributes, lists, maps, comments, and starter documents.
English and Russian extension metadata.

Semantic validation against an application-specific schema or Go structs is intentionally outside the scope of this extension.

Example

server web 80 { # public server
    host '127.0.0.1';
    tags [api, 'public web'];
    credentials (user, admin, password, secret);
}

Use Format Document in VS Code to format a valid UNIC document.

UNIC Syntax

UNIC is a text file containing fields, blocks, lists, and maps. Basic rules:

Basic constructs

Construct	Example	Description
Field	`key value;`	Assigns a scalar value (string, number, boolean).
Block	`key { field1 val1; field2 val2; }`	Groups fields (similar to a struct).
List	`key [val1, val2, val3];`	Ordered collection of values.
Map	`key (key1, val1, key2, val2);`	Key‑value pairs (keys are always strings).
Attributes	`key attr1 attr2 { ... }`	Values before an opening block brace become struct attributes.

String escaping

To avoid conflicts with system characters ({}[]();,#), spaces, quotes, or line breaks, the following rules apply:

If the string contains ", {, }, [, ], (, ), #, ;, , or spaces – enclose it in single quotes: 'hello "world"'.
If the string contains ', {, }, [, ], (, ), #, ;, , or spaces – enclose it in double quotes: "hello 'world'".
If the string contains both ' and " as well as special characters or line breaks – use triple backticks: ```hello 'world' "foo"```.

Input must be valid UTF-8. Invalid UTF-8 sequences are rejected with a parse error.

Example:

message 'Hello, "friend"!';
path "C:\\Program Files\\App";
multiline ```first line
second line```;

Comments

Single‑line – after ; on the same line:
```
port 80; # standard port
```
Block – after { on the same line (applies to the entire block):
```
server { # server settings
    host '127.0.0.1';
}
```

Attributes

If values are given before an opening block brace, they are interpreted as struct attributes. The attr=N tag sets the ordinal number (starting from 1). Example:

server web 80 { host 'localhost'; }

corresponds to the struct:

package main

type Server struct {
	Tag  string `unic:"tag,attr=1"`  // "web"
	Port int    `unic:"port,attr=2"` // 80
	Host string `unic:"host"`
}

Contributing

Create a branch from master.
Make the change and add or update tests.
Run make check and make package.
Open a pull request describing the behavior change.

UNIC Config

The OSSPkg Team