Categories
Code Quality JavaScript Tools

Prettier: Ending Code Style Debates by Removing Choices

Prettier is spreading through JavaScript projects rapidly. It's a code formatter that automatically formats your code and gives you almost no configuration options. This sounds terrible—who wants a tool that doesn't respect their preferences? But in practice, teams love it because it ends code style arguments forever.

What Prettier Does

Prettier takes your JavaScript (and CSS, HTML, Markdown, etc.) and rewrites it according to its own style rules. You save a file, Prettier reformats it. No arguments, no configuration, no debates.

// Before
function foo(x,y,z){return x+y+z;}

// After
function foo(x, y, z) {
  return x + y + z;
}

It handles:

Categories
Developer Experience IDE Tools

VS Code Is Winning the Editor Wars by Not Fighting Them

Visual Studio Code is everywhere. Look at developer screenshots, conference talks, or GitHub coding streams—it's VS Code. Two years after launch, Microsoft's editor has become the default choice for JavaScript development. The speed of adoption is remarkable, and the strategy is worth examining.

How We Got Here

The JavaScript editor landscape used to be fragmented:

  • Sublime Text: Fast, lightweight, but shareware ($70)
  • Atom: GitHub's editor, free, slow, but customizable
  • WebStorm: Powerful IDE, expensive ($129/year)
  • Vim/Emacs: Power users only
  • Notepad++: Windows only, basic

No clear winner. Developers had to choose between speed, features, and cost. Then VS Code launched in April 2015 and rapidly improved.