dart_style VS Dart-Code

> Oh I'm curious why you're rewriting it?

The primary driver is that we're moving to a fairly different formatting style: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1253

The formatter works sort of like a compiler in that it parses the code, translates it to an internal representation, does optimization on that IR, and then outputs final code. The main difference is that the "final code" is also source code, and the "optimization" is line splitting.

The old IR grew organically over time and got increasingly difficult to work with. It baked certain formatting choices directly into the IR (mainly indentation) which line splitting then had no control over. For example, given a function call like:

    someLongFunctionName(some + long + argument + expression, [firstElement, anotherElement, aThirdElement]);

in your analysis_options.yaml. The formatter doesn't understand the new syntax yet, though.

Sorry, perhaps im not quite familiar with the GitHub issues you’re chatting about, but a quick search shows the Dart team actually made a very similar argument about laptops and diffs as the first reply in a thread about the 80 character max: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/833

Nope, but there is a proposal to set line length in pubspec.yaml: https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/918

The standard Dart extension only supports formatting using the SDK-supplied formatter (dart_style) which (by design) is not configurable (although it can be turned on/off with the dart.enableSdkFormatter setting).

Flutter itself provides formatting choices, however, it only formats Dart files and it doesn’t re-order the code. Flutter formats the code based on these formatting rules.

There are some other possibilities - such as complex code being slow to format (for example I hit https://github.com/dart-lang/dart_style/issues/1022 and originally thought it was a repro for this issue), or that the server is busy doing its initial synchronous scan of the workspace, though those should be temporary and the format should eventually complete so it's probably not what most people are reporting here.

If it is related to the Dart/Flutter plugin, you should file a bug for that project and not for Dart or Flutter.

You say that only thing I did was open an issue and take the credit. I take that feedback constructively, but one tiny contribution I did though is make the Dart extension use the new API.

I can't help with the first few, but if you're seeing slow performance writing Dart/Flutter, please file an issue at https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues.

It would probably be better if you file an issue here: https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues

You might want to look into Dart-Code how these closing labels are generated and then create another VSCode plugin to create your kind of code decoration. I had a 1min glance at the plugin source code and I think, this API is responsible to creating such decorations.

The DevTools are a stand alone web application that are integrated into VSC using a VSC-specific webview component. This integration is written in TypeScript. See here.

I'm not aware of any other formatters for Dart. There's an open issue about more flexible formatting at https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues/914 but it's not something being actively worked on. If someone was to create their own formatter I've offered in that thread to provide some pointers for wrapping it up into a VS Code extension (the Dart extension already supports disabling its own formatter, although VS Code now allows you to more easily select a different formatter).

Also, there's already an official extension for Dart which is open source, have you thought about contributing this feature to that extension?

This fix: https://github.com/Dart-Code/Dart-Code/issues/3332