Comments on: Open Letter to Geertjan Wielenga

By: uf

uf — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 12:42:32 +0000

You do not need format full text. I format usualy a selected text not to miss my other formating.

By: Kieron Wilkinson

Kieron Wilkinson — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 12:46:00 +0000

I don’t think it is that rare, we do the same thing all the time, like in our XML builder DSL. The Annotation idea is great, though I don’t suppose it needs to be annotations, just as long as you can specify the indent/newline behaviour in the DSL classes and not the call site. I guess I’ll submit this to the IntelliJ IDEA enhancement requests

By: Rob Sessink

Rob Sessink — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:34:23 +0000

Hoi,
the new Galileo version of Eclipse has an new Formatter option to preserve user line breaks, no sure about the alignment of spacing/tabs

Please see
http://download.eclipse.org/eclipse/downloads/drops/R-3.5-200906111540/eclipse-news-part2.html

By: weeniearms

weeniearms — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 22:31:51 +0000

I doubt anyone will consider this as worth the effort of implementing. It’s rather impossible to do such a thing without any special annotations in your code and having extra noise just for formatting purposes doesn’t seem a good thing either. Nevertheless, removing newline characters in the process of code formatting is rather disturbing. If I break my lines for readability purposes then the IDE should not mess that up for me, especially when it comes to method chaining.

In such rare cases like the one described in this post I would suggest using groovy and the builders concept. It formats right in almost any IDE and is even more readable then the provided pecia example.

By: Peter

Peter — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:50:15 +0000

Hmmh, I think it is a very rare usecase. So that I think the developers of netbeans won’t accept the (high?) implementation effort.

What else do you prefer in eclipse?
Maybe I can convince you …

By: Wilfred Springer

Wilfred Springer — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:05:19 +0000

Using trailing slashes (//) works fine for newline preservation, but I actually want the indent to be ok as well. And ideally it should be kept in sync with the indent set in my IDE. So //#start-verbatim would sort of work, but the IDE wouldn’t help me to layout what’s inside, and whenever I would change my indentation settings, the IDE wouldn’t be able to adjust what’s inside the //#start- and //#end-verbatim comments.

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:42:05 +0000

( … trim whitespaces )

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:40:46 +0000

Sorry, for posting again.
But I think the simplest style could be the following

//#start-verbatim
((HashMap) new HashMap().
_____clone()).
__clone();
//#end-verbatim

1. easy to read
2. simple to implement (I guess + hope) for the formatter tool
3. simple to use
4. easly applied to other scenarios (I had a similar problem with xml in strings …)

(The underlines were made only because of this blog software which stripes whitespaces)

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:29:15 +0000

Ah, stop. The problem is the indent…

You can hack a bit:

((HashMap) new HashMap().//
clone()).//
/* */clone();

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:26:50 +0000

This is simple

… and this works in NetBeans, too.
Wilfred, do you make your statement now true?

“I solemnly swear to erase Eclipse from my hard disk, as soon as something like this gets implemented in NetBeans”

We give you some time until 6.7. Then you don’t need to install NetBeans twice in a week