thiagomajesk
Elixir file formatting with vscode (removing whitespaces and documentation)
Hello everyone!
A little while ago I opened this issue in the vscode repository:
Make distinction when removing leading whitespace from trailing whitespace · Issue #113235 · microsoft/vscode · GitHub, which I think would help improve the way we edit Elixir files.
This is a problem that I and my coworkers noticed some time ago, where it’s not possible to use a file formatter that trims whitespace because vscode would remove trailing and leading whitespaces butchering Elixir’s markdown documentation in the process.
I was reluctant to post here at first, but if you use Elixir and vscode, please consider upvoting this request so it can get picked up by the dev team (we have one more day to get at least 20 upvotes).
Cheers!
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thiagomajesk
Wow, it seems that there’s a lot of confusion going on…
I recorded a gif to better explain, but you could also test it locally by doing the same steps:
- Install elixir-ls
- Add the config
"files.trimTrailingWhitespace": trueand"editor.formatOnSave": true - Add documentation to a function with multiple lines
- Save the file and see the markup getting messed up because vscode removes all spaces around a line and there’s no counterpart option to prevent that (like only removing spaces at the start of the line and not the end)
lud
I think there is some confusion about the “leading” word. The only “leading” whitespace on your 3rd image is the one that is still there on the 4th image.
Whitespace is considered “per line”. The editor doesn’t care about what the code means, it just removes whitespace at the end of the line, except for the line break.
On line 1 there is none leading or trailing.
On line 2, there are only spaces, and no content. The editors considers this space to be at the end of the line (trailing), and removes it.
On line 3 there are two leading spaces before @doc, and they are still there after the cleanup.
On line 4, there are two leading spaces too, before “Some”, and they are still there. After the content (after the word “here”) there is trailing whitespace, and it gets removed.
And so on.
So no, the editor does not consider all whistespace as trailing. It does not remove leading whitespace.
thiagomajesk
Thanks to everyone that contributed, we reached our goal!
While we are here jousting about semantics, there are at least 27 people (so far) that shared our pain, regardless of the “proposed” solution.
I hope this gets picked up and the team back at Microsoft can propose a nice solution that helps us solve this issue. So, thanks to you all!
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