I'm looking for something like CSS for code. Does it exist either in an IDE, or as a plugin?
The compiler often doesn't care how many more spaces or tabs or newlines you have between tokens in your code, but people do care.
I want to specify in my "style sheet" that braces always live on a seperate line, commas are always followed by spaces, and spaces always surround operators.
Somebody else could then take my code and in their style sheet, specify that no unnecessary spaces should be visible, braces should always be on the same line as their predecessor, and functions should always be separated by 3 line breaks. But the code itself should not actually change.
Is there such a tool?
I don't think such a thing exists, the best solution is to have a custom style for local coding (most IDE's allow this) and then use a tool to reformat your source code (like Jalopy for Java) when you commit it centrally.
That way you have something that's common centrally, but can still style how you want locally.
I don't know of any tool that can arbitrarily apply a style to code without actually modifying the text itself. Since you need to edit the code, that seems impractical.
This is called code formatting and if you google "code formatter" and your language of choice you should get a list of available options.
Try some eclipse based IDE (Aptana) or eclipse itsefl and and from there you can configure how the formatting works :)
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I haven't used Processing in many years. I am copying some old code into Processing and it is pasting onto one line. Is there a beautify extension for Processing 3? Have looked and can't find.
What you're talking about is called auto-formatting, not beautifying.
The Processing editor includes an auto-formatter. Just go to Edit > Auto-Format, or press ctrl+t to do it from the keyboard.
Alternatively, most code IDEs like eclipse also include auto-formatters.
However, if everything is on one line, it sounds like you're dealing with an issue copying the newline character. This can happen if you copy something from one OS to another, for example. You might be able to google for a tool that fixes this problem, but it might be simpler to just put in the line breaks manually and then use the auto-formatter to handle the indentation for you.
Auto-indenting in IntelliJ IDEA seems to automatically takes lines previous to the selection in to consideration. This means that if the indentation is incorrect in the part of the file you're working on (e.g., 3 or 5 spaces where there should be 4, or even worse, a mix of tabs and spaces) it's annoyingly difficult to add correctly indented code.
Both new lines I'm adding and lines I use auto-indent on because I've changed them anyway get messed up like this. Since the file I'm working on is being worked on by someone else as well on another branch, I really don't want to modify over a third of the file just to indent everything correctly, but I would still like the lines that I'm actually modifying/adding to be correct - I don't see any reason to perpetuate the error when it's not necessary.
Currently the best mechanism for fixing it I've found is to manually do the spaces on a line and go from there, but it's really quite annoying, especially since I can't use the tab key or IntelliJ will immediately move to the incorrect indentation. It's barely better than copy/pasting the text to Sublime Text, fix the indentation there and paste it back without formatting.
My apologies if this has already been asked, I've tried to search for it, but it's very hard to search for this as there's so many auto-indent questions.
IntelliJ IDEA recently added a feature (in v14 or 1v4.1 if I recall) where it will detect indentation that is different from your settings. It will honor those indentations (in order to keep the file consistent). Usually as soon as you start editing the file, you get a banner, although that can be turned off. The banner looks like this:
This allows you to modify this setting on a per file basis, or turn it off completely (i.e. the "Show Settings" option).
I suspect this feature is what is causing you the issue. I am not sure how it handles a case where a file has mixed indentation (e.g. most of the file is 4, but some sections are 3 or 5 spaces). You can try turning this feature off in Settings > Editor > Code Style > "Detect and use existing file indents for editing"
so i just spent some time fussing over why my String.split call in scala failed - i was trying to split on a tab.
Problem wasn't what i was doing, but rather the fact that intelliJ changes tabs to spaces. Fair enough, but can i tell intelliJ to not do that for some files - like say random text files I might be using for test/learning purposes?
First, I would turn on Settings > Editor > Appearance > Show whitespaces, that way you're SURE what white space characters are there.
Next, under Settings > Code Style > General there should be a Use tab character check box. This says "use tabs for anything that's not Java, Scala, HTML, etc.". Just make sure Java, Scala*, etc. Use tab character setting is set to what you want.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any way to be more fine grained with what file types do and do not use tabs vs. spaces.
*I'm assuming the IntelliJ Scala plugin adds a tab in Settings > Code Style.
Is there a text editor that will let me shade certain code blocks with specific colors so I can easily find them later? Bookmarks are great, but I also wanted to shade with the same color all code blocks which are somehow related to each other.
and
When my current text editors autocreate curly braces or parentheses for me and I type what I want in between them, are there any that let me either jump to the end of the line to put a semicolon there, or "return" to type the next line, or do I always have to use the arrow key to get out of the curly braces? Perhaps there is a shortcut I'm missing?
I think about every code editor, including Notepad++, has bookmarks. If you're looking for a more complete IDE, it probably depends on the language you're using. For .NET languages that is Visual Studio, but you probably would have known that. For PHP, Javascript and HTML/CSS, you can use Netbeans for PHP. Netbeans is also available for Java. It is a rich editor, and I think one of the best free general purpose IDE's available.
Marking pieces of code in colors is unknown to me. I've never seen an editor that supports this. You would also need a project in which to store the start and end points of these blocks, unless you would save them as comments or so in the file itself.
Visual Studio knows regions which you can define by a start tag and an end tag. You can collapse and unfold an entire region at once, making it quite easy to navigate through larger files.
But these regions are actually part of the code file, so you cannot use this for any file, because those region markers will probably make the file invalid.
I'm still wondering why any other shortcut key would be easier or more convenient than 'arrow down'..
Does anyone know how I can remove spaces in my code. I usually do reformat code, but this does not remove all the doubl spaces and such. I assume there is a way in the preferences but I am unable to find it.
Assuming that this is for Java code (although the general mechanism is true for most file types), you can modify when/how spaces are used in code.
Go to File->Settings->Code Style->Java
If you then click on the Spaces tab you can specify the code layout you want. After you've done this if you reformat your code it should format according to your preferences.
You can specify this for other types too (General, CSS, JavaScript and so on)