Adding Autohotkey formatter

[mstenemo]

When I try to auto indent my .ahk files, I get "There is no formatter for 'ahk'-files installed." IF it does not exist, is there a plan to implement one? How would I go about creating it?

[denolfe]

From looking at other languages' formatters, it seems like quite an undertaking. However here is an official blog post about implementing a formatter.

Just for completeness, I've also used this formatter script written in AutoHotkey, which formats the code from your clipboard.

[mstenemo]

Looking at the formatters found at the marketplace for other language formaters it does indeed look like more work than I anticipated. Would it be possible to get create a fork of a working formater, e.g. Prettier - Code formatter, and adjust it to achieve basic formating, or would it be better to start from scratch?

[denolfe]

I've clicked through a few of them, and it looks like most of them just pull in a formatting executable to do the work for them.

To get this functionality, I see 3 options:

• Find a formatter that does all of the modifications via regex and modify that
• Leverage an existing formatting script for Ahk and then copy and modify code from one of the formatters that use an executable
• If you don't need it to be in this extension, take a look into one of the "Run on Save" packages that let you run tasks on save. Rig the formatter script to execute on your current file via a task on save. A little clunky but could work.