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
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • 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...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Sexy Album Art with MooTools or jQuery

    The way that album information displays is usually insanely boring. Music is supposed to be fun and moving, right? Luckily MooTools and jQuery allow us to communicate that creativity on the web. The XHTML A few structure DIVs and the album information. The CSS The CSS...

  • By
    Create a Download Package Using MooTools Moousture

    Zohaib Sibt-e-Hassan recently released a great mouse gestures library for MooTools called Moousture. Moousture allows you to trigger functionality by moving your mouse in specified custom patterns. Too illustrate Moousture's value, I've created an image download builder using Mooustures and PHP. The XHTML We provide...

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!