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rattray

Prettier is a code formatter for JavaScript, like the hugely popular "gofmt".

Highlights of the 1.0 announcement:

- production-ready (and used, eg; React, Oculus, Cloudflare, etc)

- --no-semi option

- --use-tabs option

- parens that help indicate precedence

- many formatting improvements

There are a ton of edge cases in this work that really matter (read through the announcement for a few). Speaking as a contributor, this is some of the hardest stuff I've ever done (beats building a JS superset, http://lightscript.org). I've been super impressed by the prettier team.

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We had configurability in early versions of gofmt but realized it was a mistake and kinda missed the whole point of having a code formatter, so we removed them.

While I understand the reasons for this (especially with the culture, for lack of a better word, around Go), I feel like this is a step backward in general. The "standard" Haskell formatter, hindent, did something similar. I found the maintainer's behavior admirable -- the style that was agreed on was very different from his own, but it was what he saw after analyzing publicly available code -- but what's the problem with custom formats if they're consistent across a whole codebase?

In the case of Go, it's really advantageous to be able to jump into anyone's project and be able to read it without the additional impedance of adjusting to the new formatting model. I didn't think this would be that significant until I started participating in the Go community. This works together with Go's reduced feature set, so everyone's code ends up looking very similar.

What's the advantage of project specific, custom formats?

It allows everyone in your company's dev organization share a common `standard` of JS style, which you have agreed on, even if it differs slightly in the way it bikesheds things like single-vs-double quotes or the presence of semicolons. (I mention `standard` because we use it as the basis for our linting rules, and would LOVE to use prettier to reformat our code.)

it's something that doesn't matter that you don't ever have to worry about again. it's a huge win.

The problem with doing the same in JS is that the language has been around much longer, and wasn't designed for use with a formatter. ASI failures is a great example.

Prettier has so far resisted configuration wherever possible; it has 8 options, compared with eslint's 260+.

Can it handle escaped json string constants?

For example this: http://whitneyland.com/2017/04/first-in-the-world-to-display...

You can try prettier online at https://prettier.github.io/prettier/

Not sure exactly what you mean, but here's an example with JSON: https://prettier.github.io/prettier/#%7B%22content%22%3A%22x...

Prettier doesn't support JSON files per se (and doesn't currently plan to [0]), so you need to provide a leading `x = {...` or similar to ensure the { is parsed as an object instead of a block.

[0] https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/322

Looks like it has no understanding of json at all.

If you have a constant like this, except really long and ugly, there's quite a bit that can be done to make the code more readable.

Maybe I'll add an issue and see if anyone else cares about it.

var simpleJson = '{ "DevelopersNeedUXToo": [ { "Color": "Red", "Name": "Lee" } ] }'

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