formatter-maven-plugin VS google-java-format

I've been partial to revlc/formatter-maven-plugin for some time

The code block you pasted is not at all what the Google Java Format utility would do. Don't use VSCode to handle IntelliJ's job :P

Follow a style guide, doesn’t really matter which you choose, you’ll thank me later. This one will work automatically https://github.com/google/google-java-format

Like Prettier and ESLint in Javascript, I needed to add Java formatting and linting tools. For formatting, I looked at google-java-format, codestyle, and spotless. Since I'm not using Java framework, I can only use plugin to format my code. Although google-java-format does not support configurability, I just chose to follow Google Java format as I believe they have most common language format standard. To use google-java-format in MacOS, go to IntelliJ IDEA -> Preference (Windows: File -> Setting) and search "plugin" menu. Then, find google-java-format using search bar. Now all you need to do is to install the plugin. I didn't have to enable it, I think it needs to be enabled in some cases. You can refer to the documentation. To format your code, go to Code menu and select Reformat code or Reformat file. It will format your code.

I cloned a Maven plug-in that enforces Google code style guidelines (modifying a few things, like nesting depth): https://github.com/google/google-java-format

They follow a rectangle rule, which is easy to follow, but can lead to ugly formatting due to excessive indentation in nested statements (which are common using protobuffers). The dart formatter was a lot nicer, and considered human friendly style instead of blindly following the rectangle rule.

I spent most of my development career writing simple CRUD applications, recently I read a fascinating article: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/09/08/the-hardest-program-ive-ever-written/. It looks like a nice challenge to try creating such a tool. For sure I need first to understand how to build AST etc. I could reuse existing solutions like https://github.com/google/google-java-format, or eclipse fmt, but I would like to understand the whole process, to be able to debug all cases.

Eventually it was clear that google-java-format was pulling ahead, and it was clear that the primary reason for that was The Rectangle Rule -- a principle I'd vomited forth one day that somehow had gone the distance. Structure-revealing code turns out to be readable code, and our users kept preferring it.

Looks like this was changed in version 1.7.