stevenzeck
commented
6 years ago From @Glavin001 on June 26, 2018 14:27
tl;dr: I think with the help of https://github.com/zeit/pkg we can get what we want 😃.
We would like to have the main functionality of Unibeautify in Emacs. ... Our Emacs package could simply use Unibeautify as its sole backend.
This would be great!
However, currently that wouldn't work for us since installing NPM modules as extra dependencies is too difficult for users. Currently our users only have to install one Emacs package, plus whatever external formatters they use. There is no required dependency on anything outside Emacs.
Unfortunately, users will likely always need to install Unibeautify as an NPM package, since it is written in Node.js.
However, we could try to package using something like https://github.com/zeit/pkg Which reports:
No need to install Node.js and npm to run the packaged application
Although I have not used this bundling tool before so no promises it would work. The standard approach is always using Node.js and installing via npm.
If I understand correctly, the core of Unibeautify is essentially a huge data structure that maps programming languages and formatting options to compatible external formatters and their command line flags.
This is only part of it. Unibeautify has a registry for common options in JSON. However, the beautifiers themselves are implemented with Node.js/JavaScript and are functions registered with Unibeautify (core). Then Unibeautify CLI uses Unibeautify (core) to perform the beautification process. There are a lot of moving parts.
To recap, the common JSON file would specify:
This proposed JSON file is only so valuable. Unibeautify's implementation itself is to process and perform the beautification.
For my part, I would be happy to contribute to the maintenance of such a JSON file. The master copy could be hosted in its own Git repo or in the Unibeautify repo. I don't really mind which approach is taken if people are willing to do this. What do you think?
Unfortunately, this JSON approach is not actually practical in reality.
However, I think with the help of https://github.com/zeit/pkg we can get what we want 😃.
Glavin001
lassik
From @lassik on June 26, 2018 11:56
Greetings from Emacs-land,
We would like to have the main functionality of Unibeautify in Emacs. Before discovering Unibeautify I started writing the format-all package. Right now it's a very bare-bones Unibeautify workalike: it calls pre-defined formatters with their default options. There's also a similar and older package for Vim called Neoformat with more features than we have.
Our Emacs package could simply use Unibeautify as its sole backend. However, currently that wouldn't work for us since installing NPM modules as extra dependencies is too difficult for users. Currently our users only have to install one Emacs package, plus whatever external formatters they use. There is no required dependency on anything outside Emacs.
If I understand correctly, the core of Unibeautify is essentially a huge data structure that maps programming languages and formatting options to compatible external formatters and their command line flags. Would you be interested in explicitly encoding this data structure in a JSON file? The file could be shared by Unibeautify and different editor plugins - each plugin project would simply have a script to convert the common JSON file into whatever representation is needed in its implementation language. E.g. in Emacs Lisp we could convert it into nested lists to store in a variable in Emacs.
Of course, in a perfect world Unibeautify would be the only universal formatting package anyone needed, but currently relying on Node and NPM makes deployment prohibitively difficult in many situations. (NPM is part of the standard workflow of JavaScript developers but many others are not comfortable using it and frequently encounter errors they do not understand.) Hence I think it still makes sense to have editor-specific packages, and extract as many common parts as we can into a shared specification file.
To recap, the common JSON file would specify:
arrow_parens,multiline_ternary).Then Unibeautify and various editor plugins could mainly consist of some plumbing to construct command lines from this data structure.
For my part, I would be happy to contribute to the maintenance of such a JSON file. The master copy could be hosted in its own Git repo or in the Unibeautify repo. I don't really mind which approach is taken if people are willing to do this. What do you think?
Copied from original issue: Unibeautify/unibeautify#111