Consistent Quotation Style

[hediet]

The codebase currently uses both single and double quoted string literals.

I propose to enable the ESLint rule quotes: ["error", "single", { "avoidEscape": true }] and thus to use single quoted string literals where possible.

Not all strings in double quotations are externalized already ("noSelection").

Benefits

• This would allow to use prettier for formatting (see Investigate adopting Prettier for VS Code #124765) and is currently the biggest blocker for adoption.
• More conventional. It is uncommon to assign semantic meaning to the quotation style.

Disadvantages

• Might be a disruptive change. Could be enforced only for new/modified files however.
• Externalized strings must be identified with a different approach. It seems they are all wrapped in a localize call, which should be easy to recognize by static analysis.
• The current ES Lint rule needs to be updated

[jrieken]

The codebase currently uses both single and double quoted string literals.

The idea is that single-quoted strings aren't ever natural language (or UI) strings and that double-quoted strings are. We have a lint rule to ensure that double-quoted strings externalized.

This would allow to use prettier for formatting (see #124765) and is currently the biggest blocker for adoption.

Let's not forget that we are shipping a TS/JS formatter out of the box - that one will be better the more we selfhost on it.

[hediet]

The idea is that single-quoted strings aren't ever natural language (or UI) strings and that double-quoted strings are. We have a lint rule to ensure that double-quoted strings externalized.

It seems that externalized strings are already recognizable by the surrounding localize function call. Why do they need to be quoted in double quotes as well?

Also, here:

export const noSelection = nls.localize("noSelection", "No selection");

"noSelection" is not natural language, but in double quotes. So I guess tooling is already not picking that up?

Let's not forget that we are shipping a TS/JS formatter out of the box - that one will be better the more we selfhost on it.

But isn't the TypeScript team in control of the TS/JS formatter?
I just used Prettier on the weekend for a side project and it felt like having super powers again.
I doubt automatic line breaking will make it ever to the TS/JS formatter.

I'm not suggesting to make prettier the default formatter, but to make it possible to use it!

[hediet]

Let's not forget that we are shipping a TS/JS formatter out of the box - that one will be better the more we selfhost on it.

Even @RyanCavanaugh recommends to use prettier when we want to have automatic line breaks, which are never going to happen in the typescript formatter...

[connor4312]

I'll be honest, until the last couple weeks I never knew there was a reason behind double quotes and single quotes in the vscode codebase. I joined after the localize call existed and assumed it was just personal styles of whoever wrote the code. As far as I know all of these single-quoted calls are getting localized just fine.

Prettier does a nice thing about using single quotes only if there's no single quotes within the string, otherwise (provided there's no double quotes) it switches them to avoid escaping. Of course we could use template literals instead, to avoid the issue altogether.

I see no reason why we could not enforce single quote style in the codebase.