{"id":109,"date":"2010-12-17T13:15:32","date_gmt":"2010-12-17T21:15:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/?p=109"},"modified":"2010-12-17T13:15:32","modified_gmt":"2010-12-17T21:15:32","slug":"code-formatting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/?p=109","title":{"rendered":"Code formatting"},"content":{"rendered":"

In this post, I’ll give a quick overview on choosing a personal coding style, and present a way to auto-format code in bulk.<\/p>\n

If you take your code seriously, you probably have a code style that you consistently use. For example, maybe you always use braces with every if clause, or you use underscores in instance variable names but not local variables.<\/p>\n

Style Guides<\/h2>\n

If you work with other coders, it’s good practice to have an agreed-on general style. Google engineers have been doing this carefully for a while now, and they’re even nice enough to publish their own style recommendations for many languages, including Objective-C. I don’t agree with every guideline Google suggests (for example, the 80 char line limit), but it’s very good to consider their perspective. \u00c2\u00a0One thing I wish they did (and that I’ve seen in other style guides) is to give an explanation for each style decision; otherwise the rules may feel arbitrary and unintuitive. \u00c2\u00a0If you’re developing a personal or company style guide, make sure to refer to Apple’s suggestions as well!<\/p>\n

Google’s Objective-C Style Guide<\/a><\/p>\n

Apple’s Coding Guidelines for Cocoa<\/a><\/p>\n

Autoformatting<\/h2>\n

If you’re just catching up on good style, you may have a lot of source that suddenly looks poorly formatted to you. \u00c2\u00a0Fear not! \u00c2\u00a0You can clean it up automatically using a couple tools. The first is Xcode itself, which knows a fair amount about how to indent those lines. \u00c2\u00a0Press command-comma in Xcode to open the Preferences window, mosey on over to the Indentation section, and set your options.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To auto-indent a section of code, select it (command-A to select all) and press control-I (that’s control-not-command + i).<\/p>\n

But Xcode doesn’t handle advanced formatting details, such as enforcing consistent spacing between various elements. \u00c2\u00a0To do a good job with this, you can use the uncrustify tool that comes with UniversalIndentGUI<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0After trying out this tool for a while, I decided that I prefer to use uncrustify directly from the command-line. \u00c2\u00a0The GUI seems slightly buggy. \u00c2\u00a0You can autoformat a source file with a command-line like this:<\/p>\n

\/Applications\/UniversalIndentGUI\/indenters\/uncrustify -c uncrustify.cfg -lOC -f MyFile.m -o MyFile.m<\/div><\/div>\n

Of course, you may have to edit the paths appropriately for that to work in your setup. \u00c2\u00a0I’ve added a sample uncrustify.cfg config file to the moriarty library<\/a>. \u00c2\u00a0This file contains all the specific details about how you want your code formatted. \u00c2\u00a0The most concise documentation I was able to find on the format of this file is in the comments of this sample cfg file<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In addition, it turns out there are ways to incorporate command-line tools directly into Xcode. \u00c2\u00a0In theory, legend has it that you can set up a custom user script (these are under the scroll-looking icon in Xcode’s menu) to be able to use uncrustify to auto-format selected code with a keyboard shortcut within Xcode. \u00c2\u00a0I was not able to actually get this to work, but if you are feeling brave, here is the blog post where I first heard such tales<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Time to make some beautifully formatted code!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post, I’ll give a quick overview on choosing a personal coding style, and present a way to auto-format code in bulk. If you take your code seriously, you probably have a code style that you consistently use. For example, maybe you always use braces with every if clause, or you use underscores in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[40,27],"tags":[91,56,93,92],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bynomial.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}