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Comment by portlander12345 | Hacker News Reader

Besides the streamlining of code review, it’s hard to overstate how much this streamlines _editing_. You can modify code so much faster if you don’t have to worry at all about formatting. Just push code around any which way, cut and paste, type some giant expression into the middle of another one. Then hit Save and move on.

And contrary to what you might expect, Prettier basically never makes stupid formatting choices. It’s incredibly nuanced.

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Exactly. Currently I have been moving back and forth between languages and editors and when I code C# or Java I miss prettier all the time.

VS Studio and IntelliJ have some language formatting but the difference between them and prettier feels huge.

I miss Prettier in Python. YAPF is atrocious. Good news is some Prettier contributors (let's call em pretties) are working on Python support.

What are your gripes with yapf ? I'd like to use a formatter for my Python code; should I rather wait for something better ?

Not opiniated enough, not enough configuration in the places that matter, some formatting bugs, very slow. Try it and see, it works for some people.

My favorite thing is using long argument lists with it without a trailing comma. Similar for hardcoded np matrices.

I use Visual Studio with ReSharper on a daily basis, and it automatically formats code just fine - but I've been a ReSharper user for many years now, so I'm not sure if it's VS or R# that is doing the formatting!

Microsoft uses Roslyn to format code as it is committed.

I have kind of stopped indenting my files while editing. I know prettier will do that when I hit save (I have it as an extension in code)

Even better if your editor auto indents. I use aggressive indent mode for Emacs and it works ok. Sluggish on large files though.

After using prettier with vscode recently, I have to agree, not having to think about formatting at all while editing feels fantastically freeing.

This is what I do writing Go. gofmt comes around and cleans up my mess when I save.

This. But with Elm and elm-format :) It's a must in any language!

It's also been a wonderful recent addition to Elixir.

We started using Prettier as a pre-commit git hook and the results have been amazing. There are developers in PRs who will not be comfortable with the eslint settings, have linting turned off or will otherwise ignore linting. Prettier just streamlines so much and you can disable the warnings in eslint that prettier handles automatically. It's insanely useful.

To streamline it even more use aggressive-indent-mode in emacs. Your code is indented correctly after every keystroke and you have even fewer formatting worries.

> it’s hard to overstate how much this streamlines _editing_. You can modify code so much faster if you don’t have to worry at all about formatting. Just push code around any which way, cut and paste, type some giant expression into the middle of another one. Then hit Save and move on.

If this is a new discovery for you, it sounds like you missed out on these things we used to call "IDEs" which were pretty popular more than a decade ago.

Every IDE or editor I've used has had automatic indenting, but what I hadn't experienced before Prettier is working with a formatter that can break expressions onto multiple lines. For me, that's the new thing that streamlines editing.

If that was a common feature in formatting tools more than a decade ago, then I missed it too.

Even if true, the CLI resurgence in recent years has really out shined advances in IDE in my view

I'm not saying that CLI-based tools are bad in any way. They are awesome, especially for automation.

I'm just saying that discovering the benefits of automatic code-formatting seems like a very strange thing to do in 2018.

This has been around for a loooong, looong time now.

I hate replying with an XKCD, but https://xkcd.com/1053/

The OP didn't even state they're "discovering [it] in 2018", at all. And even if they did, so what? What is the point that you're trying to make -- that you're a better developer because you knew something they didn't?

Can you give any examples ?

This is a screenshot of some of the formatting options provided in Visual Studio:

https://imgur.com/a/6PkSi

What on earth would prettier include to make it that much more extensive?

Just curious, does VS format files based on max length and break them if it exceeds? I have never seen a setting for that

I think the idea behind prettier is that it does not have many options.

Does VS format on the fly, or only on save ?

You don't understand how much Prettier formats your code. Your condescension is misinformed. It's not comparable to run of the mill IDE formatting.

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