Code formatting: Use prettier?

[tony]

Avoid using automatic code formatters on existing code. It is fine to automatically format code that you are editing, but you should not be changing the formatting of the code that is already written to not pollute your PRs. You should also not rely solely on automatic corrections. via CKEditor Code Style docs

What does the CKEditor dev team think of tools like prettier?

Provide a description of the task

Weigh the pros/cons of automated formatting in 2021 / current year

Solutions like prettier make the environment far different than they were before.

📃 Pros / cons

• Pro: I think it automates consistent code style

• Pro: Prettier is fast

• Pro: Contributing for outside developer is easlier, less code style in regards to formatting. A machine does the work.

• Pro: If ckeditor5 published a @ckeditor/prettier-config package (see Prettier: Sharing configurations, external projects like @wiris/mathtype-ckeditor5 and ckeditor5-math could use it and get formatting config updates downstream.

• Con: even the best formatter produces bad style - if prettier were ran on this codebase right now, I expect there'd be plenty of places where readability would decline (in the short term, at least)

• Con: Some code styling things wouldn't be possible with prettier (or would require a custom plugin, and once those custom plugins get involved that's where I see friction usually since some editors ignore them and reformat the file, causing messy diffs)

  Golang does this with go fmt and python has a formatter getting more popular: https://github.com/psf/black.

• Con: eslint and it's prettier plugin is very slow

Discussion

Any thoughts from CKEditor developers and contributors. What has / hasn't worked for you?

Also - have CKEditor developers tried sharing a branch with prettier and seeing if they liked it and it worked with their setups? Could they find a configuration that looked legible?

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