Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Per-Project Whitespace with EditorConfig

By  on  

Standards can change from project to project.  Single quotes or double quotes?  MooTools, Dojo, or micro-frameworks?  And then the question that has started wars:  spaces or tabs?  I'm a tab guy myself but the team that I work on has set a two-space standard.  It's not my preference but it was a team decision so I have to drink the Kool-Aid.  I still want to use my typical tab whitespace on other projects but just this one project should use spaces.  I thought this would be a nightmare but enter EditorConfig, a utility with plugins for several text editors which allows developers to specify settings per project.

Start by creating a .editorconfig and placing it at the root of the project which you'd like to create whitespace for:

touch .editorconfig

Once the file is in place, it's up to you to set the spacing settings per file type as you wish:

# EditorConfig is awesome: http://EditorConfig.org

# top-most EditorConfig file
root = true

# Unix-style newlines with a newline ending every file
[*]
end_of_line = lf
insert_final_newline = true

# 4 space indentation
[*.py]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

# Tab indentation (no size specified)
[*.js]
indent_style = tab

# Indentation override for all JS under lib directory
[lib/**.js]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2

So not only can you set spacing per project but you can set them per file too.  I've found EditorConfig to be a lifesaver as I can code per usual without having to think about spaces or tabs.  EditorConfig made my day!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    Welcome to My New Office

    My first professional web development was at a small print shop where I sat in a windowless cubical all day. I suffered that boxed in environment for almost five years before I was able to find a remote job where I worked from home. The first...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Trailing Mouse Cursor Effect Using MooTools

    Remember the old days of DHTML and effects that were an achievement to create but had absolutely no value? Well, a trailing mouse cursor script is sorta like that. And I'm sorta the type of guy that creates effects just because I can.

  • By
    Create a Twitter AJAX Button with MooTools, jQuery, or Dojo

    There's nothing like a subtle, slick website widget that effectively uses CSS and JavaScript to enhance the user experience.  Of course widgets like that take many hours to perfect, but it doesn't take long for that effort to be rewarded with above-average user retention and...

Discussion

  1. MaxArt

    In Notepad++ you can change the indent behaviour clicking on Preferences / Tab Settings and defining the tab width and characters as a general behaviour or on a per language basis.

    • RC

      Yeah, nearly every editor and IDE worth its salt can do this.

      But you’re missing the point. EditorConfig is most useful in a COLLABORATIVE development project, where you have a multitude of devs and a multitude of IDEs/editors. EditorConfig attempts to establish a common standard for IDE/editors to enforce whitespace rules.

  2. Pete

    I recently started a repo of my editorconfig, lint config, and sublime text user preferences, this way I always have them and can keep several machines in sync.

    https://github.com/PeteSchuster/dot-config-files

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!