I use this to set my maximum line width to 80:
org.eclipse.jdt.core/org.eclipse.jdt.core.formatter.lineSplit=80
Let's face it, Eclipse's formatter is not strict.
It has a very high success rate, and format things very nicely indeed, but it is not 100% strict, sometimes it leaves lines > 80 characters and so it is useless for a project that just lints and refuses code not strictly matching the 80 columns limit and requires Eclipse code auto-formatting.
These 2 things, Eclipse-based formatting and lint, can only really work together when the success rate is 100%. If not, even changing the code by hand triggers a "reformat/reflow" on save and the check-in bombs and refuses the commit.
I cannot disable the formatting on the client and I cannot circumvent the linting.
Is there any way at all to just make the wonderful Eclipse formatter 100% strict? Something like "considerTheLimitSeriously=true"?
Notice: it's eminently "unstrict" in lines with method signatures, but not only.
Sorry, there's no way to make the formatter 100% strict when it comes to line splitting. According to JLS 3.8. Identifiers:
An identifier is an unlimited-length sequence of Java letters and Java digits, the first of which must be a Java letter.
So it's possible that some lines cannot be split without causing a compile error.
The best you can do is set the formatting as strict as possible, then look at specific lines in your code to see where this is failing. On the Eclipse main menu go to Window > Preferences, then go to the Java > Code Style > Formatter tab, then click Edit. There you'll find a Line Wrapping tab where you can customize the line wrapping rules.
Related
Prettier (VSCode) does a great job beautifying my code on save.
There is one feature that I consider important in code formatting which I can't find in Prettier.
I want to align chars =, :, =>, etc., in multiple lines like this VSCode plugin does.
The universal answer to questions like "How can I make Prettier format my code in such a way that ...?" is "You can't."
Prettier's purpose is to facilitate collaboration in projects and teams by taking care of code style, not to be a customizable code formatter that does whatever the user wants. In other words, the formatting it produces isn't really customizable, and this is intentional. Read more here. If you need that degree of control over formatting, you're likely not the target audience for Prettier.
This specific code style (alignment) that you want to have is considered diff-unfriendly (e.g., see here or here). Prettier's line breaking algorithm by itself has similar problems (e.g, adding one argument to a call might lead to a multiline diff if the line becomes too long), but they're inevitable, so Prettier's strategy is to compensate for that by avoiding other diff-unfriendly things.
You could always utilise the Alt key or Code Maid to clean up.
If you hold the Alt Key and drag down then you can highlight the spacing to either remove or align your code.
I've noticed what seems to be a very strong convention among IDEs and code-oriented text editors. Almost any time I create a new code file, regardless of the language, IDE, or platform on which I create the file, they almost always have a trailing new line at the end.
For example:
C++ and C# class wizards in Visual Studio always have this new line after the last curly brace.
The nano editor in the Linux terminal does not allow you to remove the last new line.
Git version control makes a specific point to point out files which do not end with a new line.
So, why is this a common practice? I've never had a problem with scripts where I intentionally remove this new line. Does it have significance for legacy purposes?
Thank you for your time.
While you would be hard pressed to find a modern editor or compiler which has issues with unterminated lines, this wasn't always the case. If you need to manipulate your source code programmatically, there are probably still e.g. sed implementations out there which are buggy in this respect.
At a minimum, you should make a conscious decision about which way you want things; if you are authoring, say, a company coding style guideline, it probably makes sense to require or recommend source files to have a final newline, because it helps avoid religious wars and supports the lowest common denominator.
So I have some formatting rule to follow, such as :
Space on each side of operator (*, =, +, %, etc)
No space at the end of a line
No more than 80 chars per line
Is there a way to highlight in red line containing formating error?
The eclipse auto-formating tool is no good because either :
It will change to many line (old code not written by me)
or it won't (only my code)
Because I must follow some "colorfull" guideline :
You must change formating error relative to operators in old code but nothing else
Your code must be correctly formated.
Any ideas?
Thanks
You can select which lines of code you want to format. The Eclipse formatting tool doesn't have to run across the entire file. To do this: select the lines you want to format, then press Ctrl-Shift-F.
You could try using the Eclipse Checkstyle Plugin.
You'll need to configure it with just the rules that you need (the default configuration is very strict, so create a new one with just the rules you care about).
This will highlight all lines with formatting issues. I don't think it's possible to ignore old code using the plugin.
Talk to whoever created that coding guideline. It does not make sense in the long run, because editing code in Eclipse will always apply all current formatting rules (which violates that guideline) or none, if you disable the formatter (which leads to you writing bad code).
If there is really no way around that guideline, then you should split your workflow into 2 phases: Reformat all existing code one time to fulfill that operator guideline. You may use any tool you like, even just a regular expression search and replace might be fine.
After that has been done, configure Eclipse to auto-format only changed lines, but always apply all formattings to each changed line. There is no good reason to not re-format the other 75 characters in an existing line of code, if you already touched 5 characters of it.
I am using Eclipse 3.6.1 Build id: M20100909-0800 and Aptana Studio 2.0.5 which is based on Eclipse 3.5.2 (both on OS X) and in both programs the external tools feature seems to swallow double quotes and whitespace for the ${selected_text} variable.
Isn't the ${selected_text} variable essentially useless with the mentioned behaviour?
Is there a way around that or maybe a hidden setting somewhere?
Thanks for reading.
This could easily be considered a safety/security feature.
I suggest "${selected_text}".
...but if it's eating ALL whitespace, that won't really help. Huh. Maybe it's clever enough to detect the quotes and preserve the whitespace... but probably not.
Okay, I did a little poking around. Quotes within the argument list itself are preserved, as per my initial suggestion above. I found the following auto-generated argument list that was working Just Fine:
-os ${target.os} -ws ${target.ws} -arch ${target.arch} -nl ${target.nl} -consoleLog
-debug "${workspace_loc:/com.cardiff.bpm.ide.webforms.ui/debug.options}"
But if your text selection contains quotes, I'd expect it to be handled as per the underlying OS. Windows "cmd" does some... creative things with them for example. My *nix-fu is Not Mighty, so I couldn't tell you what OS X will do under the covers, but I suspect that's where you'll find your solution.
You may have to do something goofy like URL-encode your selection, and use some command line tool to un-encode it before passing it to your desired external tool once the text is out of Eclipse's clutches.
A (very) quick look around my 3.6.1 UI didn't turn up that would do this automagically for you, but there's probably a plugin out there somewhere that'll add that feature to an editor's context (right click) menu.
I'd expect the HTML editor to have this ability already... but I don't see anything other than "smart insert mode" that sounds promising, and I don't see that working either.
That doth bloweth goats, most heartily, yay for weeks on end. E'en till yon goat hath a rash, most unpleasant in both severity and locality. Verily.
I don't think you're getting my proposed solution:
Set up your tool so it'll de-url-encode-ificate the incoming string with some proposed command line tool.
In your editor (in eclipse), URL-encode the text you wish to select and pass to the tool. Manually.
Run the tool on the selected (url-encoded) text.
Revert the selected text. Also manually. Probably just "undo".
"1" is why I was looking for some eclipse UI way of url-encoding a selection. The HTML Editor won't even do it when you paste into an attribute string. Sheesh.
Two Other Options:
Fix the bug yourself. Open Source and all that.
Write a plugin that exposes it's own version of ${selected_text} that doesn't strip out all the strings.
Hey! SED! Replace the quotes with some random (unused in any selection you might make) high-ascii character and sed it back to a double quote instead of the proposed de-url-encode-ificationizer. You'd still have to manually edit/undo the text, but at least you won't have to """ Actually search/replace over a given selection makes that less painful than one might think.
I'm not sure what the scope of #2 is, but I'd image if you don't have any eclipse plugin experience the thought might be rather daunting. There might even be a sample plugin that exposes such a variable, though I haven't checked.
I don't think we're communicating.
You don't select text with quotes in it. You select mangled text, and sed demangles it back into quotes for you.
For example, you have the string print("hello world"); in your editor and want to send that to your tool.
change it to print(~hello world~); in your editor. Manually or via a script or whatever.
select it
run your tool, maybe wrapped in a script that'll sed the ~s back to "s.
change it back to print("hello world");.
This is a manual process. It's not pretty. Bug workarounds are like that. You can probably come up with a monkey script to convert quotes to Something Else, and "undo" is easy. You might even be able to get your script attached to a keyboard short cut... dunno. And ~ is a lousy choice for a replacement character, it's just the first thing I could think of that was rare enough to be a decent example.
Are we communicating yet?
For the record, I put together a patch using some guidance from a gentleman in the bug comments.
I don't know if it will be accepted, but it fixes things for me so maybe someone else may find it useful.
Again, this is only for Mac OS X Eclipse.
Start Eclipse.
Go to Import > Plug-ins and Fragments.
Import From: Active Platform
Fragments to import: Select from all plug-ins
Import As: Projects from a repository
Next >
Pick org.eclipse.debug.ui and org.eclipse.debug.core
Once the projects are in your workspace, apply the two patches that compose proposed patch v1, found at the bug tracker page for bug 255619
Go to Export > Deployable plug-ins and fragments and make a jar out of your changed packages.
Hope it helps.
What source control products have a "diff" facility that ignores white space, braces, etc., in calculating the difference between checked-in versions? I seem to remember that Clearcase's diff did this but Visual SourceSafe (or at least the version I used) did not.
The reason I ask is probably pretty typical. Four perfectly reasonable developers on a team have four entirely different ways of formatting their code. Upon checking out the code last changed by someone else, each will immediately run some kind of program or editor macro to format things the way they like. They make actual code changes. They check-in their changes. They go on vacation. Two days later that program, which had been running fine for two years, blows up. The developer assigned to the bug does a diff between versions and finds 204 differences, only 3 of which are of any significance, because the diff algorithm is lame.
Yes, you can have coding standards. Most everyone finds them dreadful. A solution where everyone can have their cake and eat it too seems far more preferable.
=========
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for some great suggestions.
What I take away from this is:
(1) A source control system with plug-in type diffs is preferable.
(2) Find a diff with suitable options.
(3) Use a good source formatting program and settle on a check-in standard.
Sounds like a plan. Thanks again.
Git does have these options:
--ignore-space-at-eol
Ignore changes in whitespace at EOL.
-b, --ignore-space-change
Ignore changes in amount of whitespace. This ignores whitespace at line end, and considers all other sequences of one or more
whitespace characters to be equivalent.
-w, --ignore-all-space
Ignore whitespace when comparing lines. This ignores differences even if one line has whitespace where the other line has
none.
I am not sure if brace changes can be ignored using Git's diff.
If it is C/C++ code, you can define Astyle rules and then convert the source code's brace style to the one that you want, using Astyle. A git diff will then produce sane output.
Choose one (dreadful) coding standard, write it down in some official coding standards document, and get on with your life, messing with whitespace is not productive work.
And remember you are a professional developer, it's your job to get the project done, changing anything in the code because of a personal style preference hurts the project - it wont only make diff-ing more difficult, it can also introduce hard to find problems if your source formatter or compiler has bugs (and your fancy diff tool won't save you when two co-worker start fighting over casing).
And if someone just doesn't agree to work with the selected style just remind him (or her) that he is programming as a profession not as an hobby, see http://www.ericsink.com/entries/No_Great_Hackers.html
Maybe you should choose one format and run some indentation tool before checking in so that each person can check out, reformat to his/her own preferences, do the changes, reformat back to the official standard and then check in?
A couple of extra steps but they already use indentation tools when working. Maybe it can be a triggered check-in script?
Edit: this would perhaps also solve the brace problem.
(I haven't tried this solution myself, hence the "perhapes" and "maybes", but I have been in projects with the same problems, and it is a pain to try to go through diffs with hundreds of irrelevant changes that are not limited to whitespace, but includes the formatting itself.)
As explained in Is it possible for git-merge to ignore line-ending differences?, it is more a matter to associate the right diff tool to your favorite VCS, rather than to rely on the right VCS option (even if Git does have some options regarding whitespace, like the one mentioned in Alan's answer, it will always be not as complete as one would like).
DiffMerge is the more complete on those "ignore" options, as it can not only ignore spaces but also other "variations" based on the programming language used in a given file.
Subversion apparently supports this, either natively in the latest versions, or by using an alternate diff like Gnu Diff.
Beyond Compare does this (and much much more) and you can integrate it either in Subversion or Sourcesafe as an external diff tool.