Formatting

[joachimschmidt557]

In my opinion, the current state of formatting is not great. I want to gather some community input on how and whether to transition to something else.

The status quo

Right now, we use zig fmt <file.zig> on the file on disk and revert the buffer to the formatted file. This approach, whilst simple, has two major problems:

1. Only formatting files on disk is supported. Buffers not connected to a file on disk (scratch buffers, tramp buffers, etc.) cannot be formatted using this method.
2. revert-buffer leads to all sorts of problems Format on save makes the cursor jump randomly #73 zig-mode changes my font size #61 lsp-mode is turned off for buffer on buffer save #49, a lot of which would be solved by Restore minor-mode-list across revert-buffer Calls in zig-format-buffer #71.

reformatter

reformatter is an emacs package which provides formatting support to some major mode packages. The formatting procedure works by passing the buffer contents as stdin to the formatting program and reading the formatted code via stdout. zig fmt supports this. If you want to try this approach, a branch and a PR for this already exists: #51

Remove formatting

We could also remove formatting altogether and direct users towards packages such as https://github.com/lassik/emacs-format-all-the-code.

Other

If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave a post in this discussion!

[joachimschmidt557]

I will go forward with merging the reformatter branch on the 1st of January 2023. Users of zig-mode are encouraged to test out the reformatter branch before that and report any bugs if any should show up. I believe this is a good way forward and hope it elevates the user experience of using zig-mode. However, I am willing to be proven wrong and should it turn out to be a bad decision, I am open to reverting it.