Script editor can auto-format code

[edmundito]

Describe the problem Formatting code is tedious, and many developers want to avoid it. There have been many improvements to code formatting in other editors and other languages, it would be nice to have the same in the scripting.

Suggested change An checkable option to automatically format the code when saving. It would format the code in the most readable way possible. Because there's different philosophies on where brackets go, that should probably be another option as well.

[ericoporto]

I have taken a look at this, if this was just figuring it out the indentations, it's possible to parse and use the fold marks as a way to figuring it out, and go from line 1 to the last and adjust to put the "insides" of the folds with an upper level of indentation from the parent, and this can be done entirely in Scintilla commands. Let's call strategy A.

But, there is no guarantee the start of a block is right in the next line of something that requires an open block. This would mean either adding or removing lines at these places. After this is done, if there is a way, a second pass with strategy A works. Let's call this the strategy BA.

Now the other approach I can think is to parse the code and store the contents in some simplified AST, that doesn't contain the details, begin an undo action in Scintilla, clean all lines and print from the AST with the right format and the end the undo action. This looks more certain to work. Let's call this strategy C.

I think strategy A is similar to what we have while typing so I get that is something that can maybe be always on. C looks easier to write tests.

[ivan-mogilko]

"Format the code in the most readable way possible" does not sound like a well defined feature. Everybody will have their own opinion on what it is.

I honestly think that we should aim towards finding a library or some kind of an advanced text editor control that allows to configure the autoformat settings in accordance to contemporary standards and format code at real-time, and not have to write or maintain this ourselves.

[ericoporto]

I looked around and I couldn't find something really good for this yet

• most of formatting libraries are written in either js or typescript and expect you to build them and run them in node/a browser.
  • there a few not well-maintained but so far working libraries that can use a tree-sitter parser so it could use the ags-script tree sitter parser to build on top, but it's still JS.
• the native (C++) thing I found is Uncrustify, which I think could use its C, C++ or C# parser to run on AGS Script due to its similarities, and it has a long list of configurable options
  • it looks like Unity Technologies and a few others using this (some Azure people) fork this instead, because even though there is a lot of configurations, there are limits (the line limit option looks like the biggest source of issues)
• I couldn't find something in C# that is maintained, it seems previous projects that were built in C# were also intended to be used in C# code, but I think something from Microsoft (Roslyn?) won over them all.

I plan to look more into Uncrustify and see if it's there any strategy to add a new language there.