Setting formatting rules in Vim

Question

I'm not Vim noob, but I'm not a professional either. If I have a segment, in this case javascript, such code

function foo(a,b,c,d) { if (one||two) { if (rhyme||reason) { return true; } return false; } } 

and I will format it ( gg=G ), I get the following code:

 function foo(a,b,c,d) { if (one||two) { if (rhyme||reason) { return true; } return false; } } 

It is more aesthetically pleasing. However, if instead I wanted lower (or if I wanted to convert the above result into the following result):

 function foo( a, b, c, d ) { if ( one || two ) { if ( rhyme || reason ) { return true; } return false; } } 

Is there a way to instruct Vim how to parse the code? I can use a hack with regular expressions to search for brackets and spaces, but it falls apart if we consider all the operators ( !,%,*,-,+,=,/ )

Answer 1

Try this vim plugin: https://github.com/Chiel92/vim-autoformat

A click of a button and you're done. It uses gq and installs external formatted programs for proper use.

Basically, if you install this plugin along with einars js-beautify, it can format javascript out of the box.

Answer 2

A few different comments:

• The = operator only processes indents; unless you cancel its behavior with :set equalprg=foo . This will not change the content of each line. See :help = .

• The gq operator reformats the text line by line. By default, it uses its own internal formatter, which accepts the parameters set via :set formatoptions (see :help fo and :help fo-table ). If you know an external tool that will reformat the code the way you want, you can set formatexpr (per-buffer) or formatprg (globally) to call this program when you execute gq . See :help gq . Using this instead of gg=G just becomes gggqG .

• The vim website has a plugin for the Javascript designer. I have not used it. This is just vimscript, so if you want to hack it to format things the way you want, all this is for you.