Re: c-ts-mode

[Petteri Hintsanen <petterih@iki.fi>]

João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:

> Maybe in the past CC Mode's styles were very useful, but I don't
> think they attract the same interest today because there are these
> external tools.  For the same reason, I don't predict ts
> indentation styles to become widely used.

I have to disagree with this.  Built-in styles are useful, and for me
they have been, in all major modes I've used (not just CC mode), close
enough for almost all use cases over the years.  I use external tools
like clang-format only to satisfy some CI systems that (IMO stupidly)
enforce certain formatting.

In general I'd find it a bit disconcerting if the tendency is to move
towards external stuff for basics like syntax highlighting and code
formatting.  I personally don't like the idea of installing a couple of
libraries plus their emacs glue libs, source code formatters along with
their dependencies, and huge language servers [*], to get first class
"editing experience" -- Emacs is supposedly a text editor, after all.
Especially given that I've got to install and use Emacs on resource
limited machines and ones where I do not have admin rights, so I cannot
install those externals just like that.

It is great that Emacs is able to leverage the power of third party libs
and tools, but I think this should not come at the expense of built in
functionality.  Of course the rant above was a rhetoric exaggeration,
but still it is perhaps something to keep in mind when designing for the
future.

Thanks,
Petteri

[*] e.g. clangd eats regularly gigabytes of memory, has tons of
dependencies, and needs tunings for the build and sysroot and whatnot