This page is a work in progress and currently NOT official!

As a general rule, Evergreen contributions should follow these basic conventions.

• Code
  • Indents should be 4 spaces
  • Lines should be kept at 80 characters or less if possible
  • Tokens should be separated by whitespace (i.e '$this = 1' not '$this=1')
  • Opening braces should be on the same line as the corresponding token and 'else' should be "cuddled"

    if ($this) {
        that();
    } else {
        something();
    }

    not

    if ($this)
    {
        that();
    }
    else
    {
        something()
    }

  • Control structures should be followed by spaces, function names should not (see 'if' vs 'that' above)
• XML files
  • (4 space indents as well?)
• Text files
  • Basic text files may use actual tab characters as needed

The following Vim options or something similar (often set via .vimrc) will help with proper indentation:

set tabstop=4
set softtabstop=4
set shiftwidth=4
set expandtab
set backspace=indent,eol,start
autocmd BufEnter ?akefile* set noet ts=4 sw=4  "use real tabs in Makefiles
autocmd BufEnter *txt set noet ts=4 sw=4  "use real tabs in txt files
autocmd BufEnter *out set noet ts=4 sw=4  "use real tabs in txt files
autocmd BufEnter *csv set noet ts=4 sw=4  "use real tabs in txt files

In addition, the following VIM options have been recommended by a prominent Evergreen developer but are not actually format related :

set hlsearch
vnoremap < <gv
vnoremap > >gv
set nobk
set whichwrap=b,s,<,>,[,]
set smartcase
filetype on
syntax enable
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.xhtml setf html
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.bsh setf java
au BufNewFile,BufRead *.ftl setf html
set bg=dark
let loaded_matchparen = 1

The following options are recommended for using perltidy to format your Perl code:

• -b : Backup and modify in place
• -ce : Enable the "cuddled else" style

Example:

perltidy -ce -b Object.pm

This will tidy Object.pm and move your original to Object.pm.bak. Note that this will clobber an existing Object.pm.bak file!