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 a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam

    I love almost every part of being a tech blogger:  learning, preaching, bantering, researching.  The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe:  dealing with SPAM comments.  For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day.  PER DAY.  Bloating my database...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Submit Button Enabling

    "Enabling" you ask? Yes. We all know how to disable the submit upon form submission and the reasons for doing so, but what about re-enabling the submit button after an allotted amount of time. After all, what if the user presses the "stop"...

  • By
    Image Reflections with CSS

    Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image.  The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves.  Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...

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!