Easy Tools for YAML Editing  

With YAML becoming increasingly common in configuration files and data exchange, it makes sense for developers to seek out specialized YAML editors to add to their everyday toolkit.

Although YAML is simple, its strict reliance on indentation and formatting can make it prone to errors. Intelligent YAML editors provide features that can make coding faster while minimizing these issues. XMLSpy includes an intelligent, text-based YAML editor as well as a unique YAML Grid view. YAML Grid represents the document structure in a visual way that makes it easier to understand—while unlocking additional functionality for efficient editing.

Let’s take a look at how it works.

What is YAML?

A superset of JSON, YAML is an acronym of YAML Ain’t Markup Language—a playful nod to the abundance of markup languages available today. Its memorable name reflects its goal: to be a practical, yet human-readable format for structuring data. YAML is increasingly used today for configuration files, documentation generation, data serialization, and application programming. 

A key benefit of YAML is its simplicity and versatility. By using indentation and colons to represent hierarchical structures, YAML keeps configurations concise and easy to read. It supports different data types, such as scalars (like strings, numbers, and booleans), sequences (lists), and mappings (key-value pairs). The format allows for data reuse through anchors and aliases, making it efficient for representing complex structures that include duplicate content.

Though YAML is designed to be a simple language for representing data, it does take some learning, even for developers familiar with other markup languages like XML and JSON. This YAML Tutorial is a great place to start.

Visual YAML Editor

As with its approach to XML and JSON development, XMLSpy offers users two options for YAML editing: text view and grid view. The text-based YAML editor includes syntax highlighting, source folding, well-formedness checking, schema-based validation, and schema generation, as well as conversion between YAML, XML, and JSON.

YAML Grid is a visual editor unique to XMLSpy. Grid View displays a tabular representation of the document’s structure that is easy to understand and navigate. This lets you interact with YAML data in a more user-friendly format, reducing errors that may occur from manually editing raw YAML files (such as misaligned indentation).

The graphical representation of the YAML document in grid view enables some additional functionality for editing that’s not possible in a text editor. For instance, the YAML document structure can be easily modified by adding, deleting, or moving objects in the grid. Entire blocks of text can be reorganized quickly by sorting them or moving them with drag-and-drop.

In-cell commands make it easy to make valid changes on a per-cell basis, for instance to add new content or switch the datatype of an existing node. In-cell buttons also allow you to precisely expand or collapse sections of the document as needed for easy navigation.

Table Mode allows a node with descendant nodes to be displayed in a table format for easy understanding, with each descendant object displayed in a separate row. You can toggle Table Mode on and off to suit the content at hand, and you can adapt the table display for different types of data using the Flip Rows/Columns button to reorient how the content is displayed. Here is a table shown in grid view…

…and that same table with rows and columns flipped.

Anchors and aliases are an integral part of YAML that make managing repeated data simpler. You can easily add anchors via the right-click context menu, and then corresponding aliases autocomplete as you type. Once defined, anchor and alias icons help you understand these relationships at a glance.

Filters and formulas based on XQuery can be used on multiple levels of the YAML document to filter and process data as needed. (Note that that since these two features are based on XQuery, they will only work in JSON-like YAML that doesn’t include anchors and aliases.)

Get started with YAML development

Including both text and visual YAML editors in XMLSpy lets developers work in their view of choice and even switch back and forth between the two as needed. Other YAML features in XMLSpy include:

• Validation based on YAML Schema and JSON Schema
• YAML Schema generation
• Graphical JSON and YAML Schema editor
• Conversion between YAML / XML / JSON
• High performance YAML validation via RaptorXML Server

All this functionality is available in XMLSpy versions 2025 and higher. Download a free, 30-day trial to see how YAML Grid View makes working with this standard easier than ever.