Re: vim autoformat ?

On Sat, May 27, 2023, 13:02 Enan Ajmain <3nan.ajmain@gmail.com> wrote:

Igor:  I second Matvey's caution.  If you are working on a project that
has an autoformat tool which all contributors are supposed to be using,
e.g., uncrustify, then autoformatting could possibly be useful.  But if
you're working on a project that imposes no such formatting guideline,
then auto formatting code someone else wrote, which doesn't concern the
logic you're coding in a particular commit, is at best unhelpful for the
other contributors.  And I mention other contributors because judging by
your comments such as "Looks like those people never coded in their
life," it's reasonable to expect you code in projects with multiple
people, not just yourself.

And as for a suggestion to your original question: see ':h formatprg',
':h formatoptions', ':h formatexpr', etc.


--
Enan

The other problem with reformatting an entire file is that you lose history. Git, for example, has a feature called blame (or credit, depending on your frame of mind) that will tell you the last person who modified each line and the corresponding git commit, which is useful if you have questions about a particular block of code and want to know whom to ask. If you reformat the entire file, though, then it will appear as if you wrote the entire file. Regrettably, this isn't just hypothetical: I've occasionally asked a developer about some code only to be told that they only reformatted it to make it pretty and can't actually explain what it's doing.

A better solution would be for you to figure out exactly which lines you've changed and only operate on those. I did recently write something in Vim9 to do this and use it to strip trailing spaces and things like that, but only from lines I've added or modified. (Back when I wrote it, I asked if there was any interest and no one expressed any, so it's not really in a state where it's ready to be consumed by other people as a proper plugin.)

Salman

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