Development - Indenting and Formatting

Chapter XII. Development guidelines

• 1. Indenting and formating style
• 2. Naming
• 3. Declaring procedures
• 4. Header files
• 5. New files
• 6. File reference
• 7. Patches
• 8. Translations
  • po-files-introduction 8.1. Introduction
  • po-files-basics 8.2. PO files basics
  • po-files-shortcuts 8.3. Shortcut keys
  • po-files-contribute 8.4. How to contribute
• 9. Some tips
• 10. Making releases
• 11. Useful stuff

Work hard but have fun!

1. Indenting and formating style

Indenting can be done with the indent command line tool. Bluefish uses tabs - not spaces, and I'll explain why.

Some programmers prefer a lot of indenting, 8 characters, some prefer less, 3 characters. If Bluefish code was indented with spaces, these programmers had a problem, they would have to change the files to view it in their favourite layout. But because we use tabs, these programmers can simply set the tab width to a different value, and without changing the files it looks good for both programmers!

To indent properly with indent, issue this command:

$ indent --line-length 100 --k-and-r-style --tab-size 4 \
-bbo --ignore-newlines bluefishcode.c

Comment all public functions like it is done in bf_lib.c and gtk_easy.c (javadoc style, with some small differences), this can be used to create a function reference.