I don't know the history of why design decisions were made in JSON, but one might be the allowance for spaces in keys and mirroring the usage within arrays (where commas and spaces may be used in a string, but shouldn't be confused with a record separator).

Per my other comment, there are a variety of plugins on the editor side that will make JSON look like this (e.g., vim-json ). To write out to JSON from that format, you can obviously just write a plugin (in JS this is one line).