abtxt

Abtxt is a term used in computing to refer to several lightweight plain-text formats that share a common goal: to provide human-readable, machine-parseable representations of simple data or annotations. There is no single formal standard named abtxt, and different projects may implement different variants.

Common characteristics include plain ASCII text, a line-based structure, simple key-value or header-value pairs, support for sections or blocks, and optional comments indicated by a prefix such as #. Variants may differ on syntax details such as how to represent multi-line values or nested structures. The formats are often used for notes, lightweight configuration, or short data-interchange tasks where full JSON or YAML would be overkill.

Adoption and tooling: because abtxt is plain text, it can be edited with any text editor and processed with simple parsing rules or regular expressions. Several project-specific libraries exist to read or write abtxt in languages like Python, JavaScript, or Go, but there is no single repository or standard parser.

See also: plain text, INI, YAML, JSON, TOML.