I've seen this plugin trend on Salesforce Twitter. Can you summarise what does it do that beautify with simple config or Illuminated Cloud 2 formatter cannot do?
- It is opinionated so teams no longer have to debate about coding styles. It is a refreshing change once you get used to that mindset. IC2 formatter has many configurations that developers can tweak, but that means you as a team need to debate within yourself which one(s) to configure.
- It is a CLI tool. That means you can do things like: run it as a linting tool on every commit to enforce coding styles, run it as a pre-commit hook, auto format files when you save in your IDE, etc. IC2 is closed source, and as far as I know there's no easy way to run it in a headless way.
- It is free.
- It is open source and has been tested on millions of lines of code. If you're using an open source Apex library, chances are it's part of the integration test suite, see [0]
- It is written specifically for Apex/SOQL/SOSL. That means it knows the context of your code and can format based on that. Tools like Uncrustify technically do work on Apex code, but it is being parsed as a generic C-like syntax so a lot of things do not work right (especially when Apex moves farther away from being Java-like).
- It is blessed by Salesforce, and their official IDE (VSCode) will soon adopt Prettier as the formatting tool of choice.
Those are just a few reasons. Prettier has a dedicated page [1] for everything else that also applies to this project.
