Yeah something like that should be doable but it would require that programs provide a schema and the OS to have a way for the programs to “announce” themselves so it can be aware of the configuration files and the schema.

I’m sure some project could create a GUI that could cover the most common applications, though.

It’s always fun trying to set up a program, learning the config syntax, running it, having it fail, and then spending an hour debugging before you realize it never even read your config changes because you were supposed to use one of the other half dozen conf files it has spread all across your drive. Is it under /etc/, /usr/local/etc/, /opt/, or your home directory?

And, in the meantime, you’ll only destroy your OS maybe a few dozen times!

There are existing standards. The issue is that there are too many different standards and some programs will choose to make their conf files half standardized, half unique.

There’s INI, YAML, JSON, XML, TOML, etc.

Honestly, the Linux team needs to just choose one of these formats, declare it the gold standard, and slowly migrate the config files for most core components over to it. By declaring a standard, you’ll eventually get the developers of most major third-party tools and components to eventually migrate.