CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-studio-2010visual-studiovimcoding-style
Cloud
Cloud

Reputation: 19331

Enforcing coding styles in Visual Studio and VIM

I work with a medium sized team of developers, with half being Linux developers using VIM on Ubuntu and MacVIM on OSX, and the other half being Windows developers using Visual Studio 2010 or later.

A fair bit of time has been wasted in the past when handling things like SVN operations failing due to mixed line endings, or changes to code reviews due to a mix of hard-tabs versus spaces-as-tabs (and sometimes of varying lengths, ie: 4 spaces vs 2 spaces vs 8 spaces, etc), and I would like to put an end to it.

The plan is to adapt a common coding style we've designed, which is almost identical to the Linux Kernel coding style. For all developers, we could require them to run their code through the checkpatch.pl script used by Linux kernel devs, but our code includes C, C++, and C#, so we would need to generalize the rule checker script beyond just ANSI C.

Is there a generic way to implement a rule set for VIM, and another for Visual studio? We'd like to generate a script that checks entire files, which could be hooked into our version control system so that it's run on code before commits complete, and perhaps as a run-time script to enforce the style as coders type?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2483

Answers (2)

David Harrison
David Harrison

Reputation: 256

The run-time "script" is the best first-line of defense. In this case, it will be various Vim and Visual Studio settings to help enforce your code style. That alone will catch quite a few problems. Keep in mind, this won't catch everything, but will encourage the coding style you want.

I've worked across Linux & Visual Studio in a team before (and sometimes by myself). The whole Tabs/Spaces issue drove me nuts as there would be wholesale groups of lines that were either shifted WAY over or not enough. To solve this, I ended up using these three settings in Vim (also set similar values in Visual Studio), thus catching one class of issues at the root.

Vim

set expandtab
set shiftwidth=4  " Mainly for if/for/while/general {} block indentation.  4 spaces.
set softtabstop=-1 " Allows us to use the Tab key and have it act like shiftwidth.

Visual Studio

  • Insert spaces when Tab key is pressed.
  • Shift 4 spaces on indent inside code block

They key is getting rid of the Tab characters, or at least having both systems use the SAME SETTINGS (i.e. both using Tab with the same values or SPACEs substituting as Tabs)

Something to watch out for:

  • Someone copying a file from one Operating System to a different one and then checking the file into SVN on that machine. SVN will blindly commit, say, a DOS line-ending file from a UNIX system. You want to checkout/commit files on the same system only. Otherwise, checking out/editing/committing files all on the same OS should present no issues, as SVN can convert the line endings upon checkout. You can "fix" this by loading a file into Vim and then converting the line-endings to the particular OS you want by typing ":set fileformat=dos" (if you want to change to Windows-style), ":set fileformat=unix" (for unix style), or finally ":set fileformat=mac" for Mac.

As far as the code style goes, as you probably already know, both Vim and Visual Studio offer lots of flexibility there. While I cannot give you the specific settings for Vim, the options to look at are

autoindent
cindent
cinoptions  (implied from cindent)
cinkeys     (implied from cindent)
comments    (default is probably fine, but here for thoroughness)

So, you will want

set autoindent

and cindent should be automatically set when editing a C or C++ file. The defaults for cinoptions and cinkeys are ok for me, but I have tweaked them in the past when working with a different group.

Don't forget about using the '=' command over a selected range of lines to reformat the code! This can be very handy!

I shy away from the completely automatic SVN backend method because it may take longer than you expect to get it right, and when it screws up, it will probably take more time out of your day than you expect as well. After all, you really just want to be productive, right?.

Discipline up front is key!

Upvotes: 3

romainl
romainl

Reputation: 196916

EditorConfig seems to do exactly what you want in Vim, Visual Studio, and a lot of other editors and IDEs.

Upvotes: 4

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