Editor Setup

StardewUI doesn't require you to use any special editor, but StarML, like JSON or HTML, is much easier to write correctly when using an editor with syntax highlighting.

Some editors may behave acceptably if told to treat .sml as either HTML or XML, but the results vary widely across editors.

Recommended Editors

These are the editors with full support for StarML, provided as extensions.

• Visual Studio, using the StardewUI Extension. Best for C# developers on Windows.
• Visual Studio Code, using the vscode-starml extension.

When using one of these editors with the corresponding extension installed, .sml (or .starml) files will be recognized as StarML and have correct highlighting for all types of syntax elements (tags, literal attributes, structural attributes, all the different attribute flavors).

Alternative Editors

If you cannot use any of the recommended editors, then the following have been tested to have partial/incomplete highlighting:

• Notepad++ using the StarML User Defined Language (see also: Import a UDL)

These options produce sane results that highlight the basic structure of the document correctly, but may struggle with certain aspects; for example, binding modifiers may be interpreted as tags or otherwise break the attribute highlighting.