Motoko import sorting proposal

Developers
1

Call this one step in developing a Motoko language formatter / linter (not sure if there’s active development on this elsewhere.) I find it useful to group imports hierarchically: base library imports → third party imports → project specific imports → imports from the current module. Example:

// Before
import AccountIdentifier "mo:principal/AccountIdentifier";
import Array "mo:base/Array";
import Blob "mo:base/Blob";
import Buffer "mo:base/Buffer";
import Ext "mo:ext/Ext";
import HashMap "mo:base/HashMap";
import Iter "mo:base/Iter";
import Nat "mo:base/Nat";
import Nat32 "mo:base/Nat32";
import Prim "mo:prim";
import Result "mo:base/Result";
import Test "../Test";
import Text "mo:base/Text";
import Time "mo:base/Time";

// After
import Array "mo:base/Array";
import Blob "mo:base/Blob";
import Buffer "mo:base/Buffer";
import HashMap "mo:base/HashMap";
import Iter "mo:base/Iter";
import Nat "mo:base/Nat";
import Nat32 "mo:base/Nat32";
import Prim "mo:prim";
import Result "mo:base/Result";
import Text "mo:base/Text";
import Time "mo:base/Time";

import AccountIdentifier "mo:principal/AccountIdentifier";
import Ext "mo:ext/Ext";

import Test "../Test";

import Types "types"

This morning I hacked together a VS Code extension to do it automatically: Motoko Formatter - Visual Studio Marketplace

edit: changed the extension name and made it a language formatter

7 Likes
2

Thank you for this @jorgenbuilder . Could this be added to the Motoko VSCode plugin as a toggleable feature? Would probably be more discoverable to new devs who dont follow the forum as closely.

3

Cool.This makes code beautiful

4

Technically simple, but there are some considerations (is the rule popular enough to be in the official extension, on/off by default, etc.) Still, that might actually be the best place for this functionality, because I don’t currently have any plans on building a complete formatter. @kritzcreek what would your stance be if I were to PR this into GitHub - dfinity/vscode-motoko: The VSCode extension for Motoko?

1 Like
5

Perhaps a PR should be made to Motoko style guidelines :: Internet Computer

1 Like
6

This is a great pattern and a great tool to enforce it! I’ll mess with the language and add it to https://icdevs.org/language_project/index.html.

2 Likes