What language do config files use?

Question

I've been using GNU/Linux for over a year now. And there's this question to which I need an answer from you, Linux gurus:

What language(s) do config files like .bashrc, .vimrc, .i3status.conf, .conkyrc, .xinitrc, etc. use?

Answer 1

There's no global standard. They can be (and are) all different syntaxes.

For example,

• the bashrc is simply a bash script,
• the vimrc a vimscript script,
• i3 uses its own syntax that's pretty close to a scripting language (but they claim it isn't a programming language, but I think they're lying there, the conditional screen placement thing looks extremely much like you can build a turing machine out of it),
• xinitrc is just an arbitrary script (which will be run by the shell specified in the #! line at the beginning of the file, so it could just as well by say, Python, bash, zsh, tcl, perl, …
• Conky uses JSON or YAML, I think,

Essentially, there is no standard, and you always need to read the documentation.