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!

Recent Features

  • By
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • 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
    TextboxList for MooTools and jQuery by Guillermo Rauch

    I'll be honest with you: I still haven't figured out if I like my MooTools teammate Guillermo Rauch. He's got a lot stacked up against him. He's from Argentina so I get IM'ed about 10 times a day about how great Lionel...

  • By
    background-size Matters

    It's something that makes all men live in fear, and are often uncertain of. It's never spoken, but the curiosity is always there. Nine out of ten women agree in the affirmative. Advertisers do their best to make us feel inadequate but...

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. 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!