[news.eclipse.tools.jdt] Re: Jave 3.3 code formatter question

["Paul A. Rubin" <rubin@xxxxxxx>]

Hi Jacek,

Jacek Pospychala wrote:
> hi Paul,
> sorry, currently there is no way to do what you want. Would you agree 
> with me, that formatting you'd like to have is very specific?

Yes -- definitely a matter of personal taste, and my taste may be out of 
the mainstream.

> I wonder what should be a more general rule, that would fit your needs.
> Regarding inserting "hard" line break. Where would you actually expect 
> it? After 29th column, after 2 argument, after second "," in line?

I was thinking that it would be entered manually.  For instance, in some 
word processors ctrl-enter means "break the line and don't alter that 
when you reflow the text".  So perhaps ctrl-enter here could mean "line 
break not to be altered during a reformat".

> Maybe it would be better to select certain types of source code (like 
> method declarations), that should not be formatted.

That would work, but I suppose the list of things to opt into/out of 
formatting could get rather long.

> I'd say, that you could raise an enhancement request here 
> https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/enter_bug.cgi?product=JDT&component=Text
> however keep in mind, that there are also voices, that formatter is 
> already too difficult to configure because of huge number of options it 
> offers.

I'm sympathetic to that, having just gone through configuration of the 
formatter.  Perhaps I'll suggest ctrl-enter as a possibility; it doesn't 
require another setting.

Thanks,
Paul