Suggestion: Add an explicit page with the recommendation against formatting/style rules

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

What problem do you want to solve?

Continuing #419: much of ESLint's community still uses ESLint for formatting logic. Two common user behaviors that are explicitly recommended against by at least me are:

• Directly using ESLint's formatting rules (max-len, semi, etc.)
• Using eslint-plugin-prettier to run Prettier through ESLint

I'm under the impression that at least the first of those two, using ESLint's formatting rules, is something the ESLint team explicitly recommends against (e.g. #419 (comment)). At the very least we recommend against it in https://typescript-eslint.io/linting/troubleshooting/formatting.

And I've been recommending against the eslint-plugin-prettier option because it slows formatting down to the speed of linting (which is particularly irksome on projects that enable slower, more powerful type checked rules).

What do you think is the correct solution?

Could we have an explicit notice somewhere on eslint.org indicating suggestions for how to use ESLint properly? How about a Configuration FAQs page with an entry for each of the two points mentioned here?

Participation

• I am willing to submit a pull request for this change.

Additional comments

No response

[aladdin-add]

It's fine to state its cons. but I'm not an enthusiastic fan to against this usage. actually, i can see both sides:

Pros:

• Totally configurable (compared to prettier).
• Easier to use, one tool to linting and formatting.

I remember @antfu wrote an article: https://antfu.me/posts/why-not-prettier. :)

[antfu]

As a user, I am very fond of ESLint's rules design that allows you to do anything with the AST. Fully customizable and extendable (via custom rules/plugins), making ESLint very powerful and attractive. @aladdin-add already stated the main two points in my mind - being able to use one config + one command to set up ESLint for both linting and formatting is a very good experience.

As a maintainer of many projects, I do understand the maintenance burden on this, and I can relate to the feeling of handling a sea of nitpicking requests. So I am totally up to the decision ESLint made to freeze the stylistic rules and leave it to the community.

But I think saying "against" stylistic rules and recommending Prettier is not an ideal solution as Prettier is an opinionated tool and does not fit very well with ESLint philosophy. A statement like that feels like a 1 and 0, implicitly delivering the message of "you are doing it wrong, and you should use Prettier" making it seems there is no middle ground.

I wish there could be a more configurable, less-opinionated Prettier alternative to recommended - but honestly, I expect it ends up being very similar to what ESLint is like right now. So to me, regardless, there is a "Lint" in the name. The core of ESLint is actually an AST checker and transformer, which is capable of doing some formatting jobs.

So, IMHO, the docs should say something like:

The builtin stylistic rules are frozen and might not cover all the cases due to the maintenance priority. If you have very strict styling needs, we recommend you look for community stylistic rules, or use a standalone formatter like Prettier instead.

to directly state the underlying reasons and its caveat, to let users do judge themselves (I think ESLint already says similar in a few places).

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And as it how it reads, I use ESLint solely for formatting since day one, and I never had formatting/stylistic issues - even if I do have some nitch needs, I wrote plugins with I believe it's how ESLint is supposed to be used.

Finally, I would like to take this chance to say a big THANK YOU for making and maintaining ESLint and those rules. They literally improve my productivity every single day, and I can't imagine how to code without them. It's amazing!

[nzakas]

Yeah, at this point, we don't feel comfortable recommending against using ESLint for formatting. I personally think we want to move away from providing formatting rules in the future, because the maintenance and performance cost are quite high, but I'd like to be able to recommend an alternative that we feel comfortable with. Right now, we don't feel comfortable formally recommending Prettier because of its no-config approach (vs. our config everything approach), so it doesn't seem like a natural transition for folks.

This is something we are thinking about, but we're just not at a point where any strong messaging around this makes sense.