Oh, wow, this is awesome. I am very interested in trying to help the Community Guidelines influence more code out there. There are so many things I want to comment on, but most of it will have to wait.
However, let me +1 on the importance of speed and ability to integrate into editors.
You say:
I would say that this is really important in the editor case, especially for matters of speed with format-as-you-type. For this Calva Formatter only reformats the current enclosing, list-ish, form. Since I want this formatter to help the Community Standard, I use cljfmt as the formatting engine. Cljfmt isn’t really meant for this to begin with so does not have the super performance that is really needed, making this minimal-range formatting extra important, but I think it will always be needed for large files.
Other things needed by the editor integrations are:
- That the formatting rules can be relaxed when used as you type. (Entering a newline in a paren-trail, moving some brackets down, should not immediately cause them to fold up again, for instance.)
- That the formatter can take the current cursor position and selection into account, and inform about where the cursor should move on the reformatted text. Todays editors with multiple cursors and selections makes this extra interesting, but we can start with the single cursor/selection case.
- The formatter should offer some low-level API to it’s AST/zipper or whatever it uses so that the integration doesn’t need to parse the text itself for figuring out things that the formatter already has figured out. (I think I sometimes have three parellell ASTs and allocations of the entire buffer text.)
There’s more on my mind regarding this, but I’m short of time and will have to return to this. Again thanks for picking up this torch!
No, one more thing. I really hope this formatter can be made available on Clojars for consumption by ClojureScript programs, because that’s what Calva needs. Zarro startup times and no managment of extrenal processes, please. 