Question

I am using emacs + slime for clojure development. Recently we got a new team member and he does not like emacs, so he installed intellij with la clojure plugin.

Both emacs and intellij allow to automatically re-indent big blocks of code, entire functions and even modules.

This leads to a very annoying problem. If he makes a small change (few lines) and then reindents entire file, then obviously recording it into dvcs (we use darcs) will produce big patch with hundreds rows changed. That makes code review impossible. How do i know which 3 out of hundreds committed lines really changed ?

So now we have collaboration problem. I wonder if there are other clojure teams who use different IDEs. How do you reconcile these problems ?

The options i see are:

1. Enforce the use of one IDE (emacs). This will solve the problem, but i do not like such an authoritative approach.

2. Somehow setup both environments to indent identically (not sure if its possible)

3. Agree to always indent in one IDE. This is cumbersome and prone to errors.

Answer 1

You could try asking him to respect the rest of the team and not automatically reformat everybody’s code.

You might also write an external program to do the indenting, and then hook that into your source code system as a pre-commit step. That way it wouldn’t matter what editor was used, it would become consistent. I suppose this is a variation on option #2.

Good luck.