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Taisei
Taisei

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Code Formatting in Nim [nim pretty]

This is my first post on dev. By the way, do you guys know Nim? It's an elegant language, compiles to C, and has a Python-like syntax. So it's very fast and easy to write. I've been using it for work recently. I was looking for a code formatting tool for it and finally found one called Nim pretty.

How to use Nim pretty

You can use it easily. Here's a sample code.

const     hello   =      "Hello"
echo   "Say, ",                      hello
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It's terrible syntax, right? Here's a way to format it.
You can run the following command.

nimpretty --indent:2 sample.nim
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The sample code can be formatted as follows.

const hello = "Hello"
echo "Say, ", hello
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The terrible code was formatted with an indent as 2.
It became quite readable but you don't want to run the command for each file, right?

Here's a better way. You can run the following command.

find . -name "*.nim" -exec nimpretty --indent:2 {} +
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All Nim files in a directory can be formatted. It's a combination of a Nim pretty command and shell script.

You can create a task in a nimble file as below if you don't want to type or copy the command every time.

version       = "0.0.1"
author        = "Sample"
description   = "Sample code"
license       = "Sample"

task pretty, "Formats all nim files":
  exec "find . -name '*.nim' -exec nimpretty --indent:2 {} +"
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And you can run the following command.

nimble pretty
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Then all Nim files can be formatted even if they are in different directories.

That's all. Any tips about Nim would be appreciated.
Thank you!!

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