Disabling the apheleia indent step

[ispringle]

I might not be understanding the purpose of the apheleia indent step but I think it's resulting in code that's not properly formatted. I'm trying to format typescript/javascript on save and what is returned by apheleia is not what prettier suggests. I was confused for a bit why there is consistently an extra 4 spaces returned by apheleia when prettier is using an indent level of two spaced. I looked in the codebase here and it seems apheleia pipes most/all code through the given formatter and then pipes that through its own indentation function.

Trying to understand the logic and point of overriding the formatter here and either working with apheleia or just ripping this indentation out of all the configurations.

[raxod502]

Where are you seeing that Apheleia is performing an additional indentation step besides what the formatter suggests?

[ispringle]

My apologies. I re-read the default prettier formatting and it's actually just supplying prettier with an indent leven based on the js-indent variable.

apheleia/apheleia.el

Line 95 in e944e24

(apheleia-formatters-js-indent "--use-tabs" "--tab-width")))

I think I will have to rewrite all of these to let prettier manage indent level, unless there is another way to just allow the default prettier config do its thing without being given the indent levels.

[raxod502]

Well, the intent of the indentation configuration is to have the formatter match how Emacs is configured to format things. Because otherwise you'd get stuff indented wrong as you type, before being fixed on save.

We might as well make this configurable though. It is reasonable to want the Emacs settings to be superseded by your formatter settings.

[raxod502]

Give #211 a try.

[ispringle]

Thanks for the work there! This works great!

[mohkale]

I kind of disagree with this choice, if your editing experience in Emacs doesn't match the end result of your formatter you should configure emacs correctly rather than overwrite your editor with the formatter. I think something like tabs or tab-width should be consistently configured otherwise it'll probably just be a constant annoyance until you save. I know when I'm in a json-mode buffer configured to indent with 2 spaces when I default to 4 that it annoys me when I enter a newline and suddenly the indentation is off.

@ispringle is there a reason you don't want to configure emacs to indent the same way as your formatter does? Generally you can do this for individual projects if you lookup which variable sets the indentation width and style. Also using editorconfig is generally recommended to avoid issues like this.

[ispringle]

We use prettier at work as a test/check for PRs. If a PR doesn't conform to prettier (ie prettier detects discrepancies) I can't merge. But I don't like what prettier looks like either, I find that 2 spaces isn't enough for me to differentiate blocks/levels well. When I'm working on my project I want it to be four spaces but when I go to save a file prettier needs to be the source of truth, not emacs.

With this I just can toggle off the emacs indent, let prettier do it's thing, commit, and then toggle emacs' indent levels back on and have readable code.

[mohkale]

Why not run prettier in a git-commit hook then and avoid formatting at all until you definitively have to? It seems like you're trying to avoid formatting instead of trying to standardize with a formatter. Perhaps that's a valid use case although I find it no less bizarre 🤔.