Code formatting

[zupo]

https://github.com/hercules-ci/canonix/ and/or https://github.com/nix-community/nixpkgs-fmt.

[infinisil]

There's also https://nixfmt.serokell.io/ which was announced on discourse

[zupo]

Has the community converged behind one of these yet? Or it's still up in the air which one will likely prevail?

[infinisil]

I personally haven't seen anybody use any formatter in a project. People in nixpkgs have been discussing running one for a while now though, which is bound to happen eventually, not sure which formatter we'll end up using.

I like nixfmt because it's simple and made with Haskell, meaning I could contribute to it easily. It uses its own parser and pretty printer code adapted from a well-known package for that, which makes me confident that it does a good job at getting good results. I just tested it a bit and it produces pretty good results. One potential disadvantage is that it tries hard to keep lines below its (adjustable) line width, personally I like that.

I haven't heard about nixpkgs-fmt before, but here's what I think about it after taking a look at it: More complicated but also an extensive test suite, still WIP though. It's based on very direct rules of a generic parser framework, which seems to make it more fragile. It being written in Rust makes it faster than nixfmt for many files though. Tries less hard to enforce a strict style, focuses on not getting in nixpkgs way. While testing it I found some places where certain expressions were formatted incorrectly.

So I'd say nixfmt would be preferred over nixpkgs-fmt.

[zupo]

I like enforcing line widths and don't care too much about performance, so I'm gonna go with nixfmt! Thanks for the help!