Black vs Taplo

Black is a free, MIT-licensed formatter for Python code that follows PEP 8. It reformats whole files in place and uses a default line length of 88 characters. Its limited style choices are intended to keep code consistent across projects; indentation style cannot be configured. After formatting, Black checks whether the abstract syntax tree remains effectively equivalent and raises an error if the check fails. Install it with pip; it requires Python 3.10 or newer. The documentation lists editor integrations including Emacs, PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, Vim, Neovim, Visual Studio Code and Sublime Text, as well as GitHub Actions and doctest workflows. Notebook formatting is available with the jupyter extra, though Black skips cells containing certain magics or invalid syntax. It also includes blackd, an HTTP server that binds to localhost by default. Black is primarily a command-line tool and does not provide a Python interface. Stable releases preserve formatting within the same calendar year when the options match.

Taplo is a free toolkit for validating, formatting, and querying TOML documents, with support for TOML 1.0.0. Its validator checks syntax and semantic issues such as duplicate keys, and can apply JSON Schema Draft 4 validation. The formatter can edit files in place or use standard input and output; by default, it stops when syntax errors occur to avoid destructive edits. The CLI also converts TOML to JSON and retrieves values through query expressions. Taplo’s language server communicates through standard input/output or TCP, though multiple TCP clients are not supported. It is excluded from default builds and is unavailable in the NPM installation. The Even Better TOML Visual Studio Code extension adds highlighting, validation, folding, navigation, renaming, formatting, and JSON Schema completion; its listing calls it a preview that may contain bugs or crash. Taplo can retrieve schemas from catalogs such as JSON Schema Store and match them to files by name. Install options include precompiled releases, Cargo, Homebrew, NPM, and Docker; precompiled releases are listed for Linux, macOS, and Windows.