A large supermajority seem to use .txt suffixes. Some uncommon cases use no suffixes at all, primarily lists with long history that were meant to overwrite operating systems' /etc/hosts files.
"Hosts" files' history stretch back to the late 1980's, and have been used for adblocking since the mid-to-late 1990's ("Peter Lowe's List", "Dan Pollock's Hosts"). It is occasionally used to this day by various tools (uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home, Pi-hole, various smaller tools), although it has never been fully implemented in AdGuard Browser Extension or Adblock Plus.
As with "Adblock Filter Syntax", implementation in GitHub Linguist would rely largely on repos' .gitattritubes specifying filetypes and linguist-detectable. I estimate a low-5-digit amount of GitHub repos using Hosts syntax, some with ≥1,000 stars.
I forgot I started work on this a while ago (on a branch I never pushed to GitHub). I've remedied that in #6391 (which is still a WIP at this stage, although input's nonetheless welcome).
Language name
Hosts
, alternatelyHosts file
.URL of example repository
https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
URL of syntax highlighting grammar
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tommasov.hosts
Most popular extensions
A large supermajority seem to use
.txt
suffixes. Some uncommon cases use no suffixes at all, primarily lists with long history that were meant to overwrite operating systems'/etc/hosts
files.Detected language
Currently none.
Submitter's notes
In relation to the previously approved and implemented "Adblock Filter Syntax" language, I talked a bit with that syntax's main owners at https://github.com/AdguardTeam/VscodeAdblockSyntax/issues/70, who from what I understood recommended to me https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=tommasov.hosts as the recommended method to add colors to Hosts lists/entries.
"Hosts" files' history stretch back to the late 1980's, and have been used for adblocking since the mid-to-late 1990's ("Peter Lowe's List", "Dan Pollock's Hosts"). It is occasionally used to this day by various tools (uBlock Origin, AdGuard Home, Pi-hole, various smaller tools), although it has never been fully implemented in AdGuard Browser Extension or Adblock Plus.
As with "Adblock Filter Syntax", implementation in GitHub Linguist would rely largely on repos'
.gitattritubes
specifying filetypes andlinguist-detectable
. I estimate a low-5-digit amount of GitHub repos using Hosts syntax, some with ≥1,000 stars.