Small configuration files
Use Nano Markup when text, sections, and lists matter more than numeric type inference or complex references.
Purpose
Why Nano Markup exists.
Nano Markup is a deliberately small data format for documents that need to stay readable as plain text. It keeps the value model to strings, mappings, and sequences so files can be easy to scan, diff, review, and implement.
Readable data
A format for ordinary text files
Many projects need a human-readable data format before they need a large configuration language. Nano Markup focuses on the common shape: named fields, ordered lists, nested groups, and multiline text.
It does not infer numbers, booleans, nulls, dates, anchors, tags, references, or schemas. Applications decide how to interpret strings after parsing. That keeps the language predictable and the parser contract small.
Use cases
Where Nano Markup fits
Readable content data
Store metadata, manifests, catalogs, profiles, notes, and documentation-adjacent data in a compact plain-text form.
Interoperable fixtures
Use the stable 1.0.0 grammar and shared conformance corpus when multiple implementations need to agree exactly.
Next step
Compare it with familiar formats
Most readers meet Nano Markup by comparing it with JSON, YAML, or TOML. The comparison pages show where it is smaller, where it is stricter, and where another format may be a better fit.