EditorConfig for consistent coding styles

August 8, 2014

Keeping consistent coding style between multiple developers working on the same project is not a simple task, specially with todays proliferation of editors and IDEs.

While there’s support for that with Vim modelines or Emacs Local Variables (and other editors defining their own), this is usually done on per file basis and not supported well (if at all) in other editors. In addition, Security is a problem with modelines and Local Variables.

EditorConfig is a possible solution. It looks for an INI style file named .editorconfig (usually placed at the root of the project).

There’s a core library (implementations of C, Python, JS and Java exists) for developing plugins for various IDEs. When given an absolute path to a file it’ll look for .editorconfig file with the sections relevant to the file and output the proper properties for the file.

For example, given the following .editorconfig file for a project:

root = true

[*]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2
end_of_line = lf
charset = utf-8
trim_trailing_whitespace = true
insert_final_newline = true

[*.md]
trim_trailing_whitespace = false

Running editorconfig on some file in the project:

    $ editorconfig ./src/app/app.js
    indent_style=space
    indent_size=2
    end_of_line=lf
    charset=utf-8
    trim_trailing_whitespace=true
    insert_final_newline=true
    tab_width=2

EditorConfig supports glob and match patterns for file, definition the following attributes:

indent_style
indent_size
tab_width
end_of_line
charset
trim_trailing_whitespace
insert_final_newline

Plugins using one of the core implementations for various editors and IDEs exist, including:

Atom
Code::Blocks
Emacs
Geany
Gedit
JetBrain
jEdit
Notepad++
Sublime Text
TextMate
Vim
Visual Studio

It’s nice to see project generators including this file in their templates, for example slush-angular and yeoman’s generator-angular.

P.S. Agreeing on an acceptable coding style is another holy war
P.P.S Let’s not forget the obligatory XKCD:

Translations

Hebrew: EditorConfig לסגנון קוד אחיד