Adjusting my SQL code formatting preferences at the moment, and it just feel so… byzantine. There’s probably close to 200 different settings here (I stopped counting after 100) and hunting through them trying to find the one that controls whether parenthesis should appear on the same line as the CREATE statement is so time-consuming.
It would be nice for editors to provide a way to “learn” a code formatting style. They can present you with some sample code and say to you, “format this the way you’d like to see it and we’ll learn from that.” There can be several of these samples, presented to you one at a time, each one intended to answer a particular question about how the style should be. For example: one might have a dramatically narrow page width, forcing the user to break long lines.
From that, they can build a profile that will be used to configure the formatter. The configuration will essentially be the same as what’s used by formatters today — and can be transferred or checked into source control like a regular config file. It’ll just come from this learning routine, rather than the user poking through piles of checkboxes and pickers spread across 8 different tabs (I counted those as well).
Could this be something an onboard LLMs can actually do? Not sure. But if code editors are looking for “AI” features to add to their product, this might be one worth considering.