Keeping your Code Clean
Indent and apply formatting styles to your project
Overview
Having a unified approach to formatting is important for multiple reasons:
- Good for beginners: using tooling to help properly format, code-complete, syntax highlighting etc. removes this burden (somewhat) for new people lowering the barrier of entry for contributions.
- Easier to read: the code tends to be easier to read (or will be once the standard formatting is learnt) which helps onboard new people to a codebase and also discover bugs.
Recommended Workflow
OCamlformat
OCamlformat tends to be the tool of choice for enforcing formatting styles in a project. It requires a very simple .ocamlformat file in the root of the project which can specify a few configuration options.
A bare bones file will contain the version of OCamlformat you want to use:
version=0.14.2
From there, depending on your setup and editor, you can:
- Run
ocamlformaton builds - Run
ocamlformatwhen saving a file (works very well with VS Code)
Formatting on save should just work if you have the OCaml Platform plugin installed in VS Code (see related workflows)
Ocp-indent
Ocp-indent is an indentation tool for OCaml. It is particularly useful for vim and emacs. If you followed the setup for those editors in the related workflow you should only need to add the following to your .vimrc.
set rtp^="$(opam config var ocp-indent:share)/vim"