Automatically Formatting Comments With Prettier is Really Nice

Many IDEs and editors still do not attempt to format multi-line comments. Possibly due to fear of messing up hand-crafted formatting or because it is just really hard to do right.

I've always found this frustrating in my own projects, specifically in the mostly TypeScript codebase of Dendriform that I have been working on lately.

After actually googling for this I found the prettier-plugin-jsdoc prettier plugin. I configured it to use an 80 column with for JSDoc comments in prettierrc.js.

This plugin can automatically format jsdoc comments and it specifically supports wrapping multi-line comments. It conserves existing newlines. It seems good enough and the benefit of having automated formatting clearly outweighs any hand crafting I had to do before.

Recommended.

My prettierrc.js looks like this:

module.exports = {
  jsdocPrintWidth: 80,
  "plugins": ["prettier-plugin-jsdoc"],
}

Note: other settings have been omitted for brevity.

To enable autoformatting in Visual Studio Code I set the following in my user settings.json:

{
  "[typescript]": {
      "editor.formatOnSave": true,
      "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode",
  },
}

Note: other settings have been omitted for brevity.