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

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

License

Copyright © 2026 The OSSPkg Team. Distributed under the BSD 3-Clause License.