Spring Boot 2.4 will add support for multi-document .properties files. These behave in a similar way to multi-document YAML files and allow the user to split a physical .properties file into multiple independent logical documents. With properties #--- is used as the separator. The reference documentation has an updated section that covers the new syntax.

The new format may cause a few problem with the IDE editor. Specifically, you can get errors about duplicate keys. It would be nice if the IDE could treat each logical section as a different document and not present those warnings. If you're interested in some Java code that parses the new format, you can look at OriginTrackedPropertiesLoader.java from the Spring Boot codebase.