Now start saving your files and watch Prettier in action.Note how VS Code gives autocompletion for the different settings within Prettier.Add a new object with a tabWidth property and a value of 4.prettierrc file in the root of your project next to your package.json You can increase that to the VS Code default of 4 if you want extremely easily. Search for Format On Save and check the boxīy default Prettier uses 2 spaces for your tab width for indenting your code.Note: Make sure you have prettier installed in the project you’re working in or globally via npm install prettier -g Format on Save in VS Code It also respects the Format on Save option I mentioned in my last blog post. The Prettier -JavaScript Formatter plugin for VS Code simply shells out to Prettier. It can do CSS, LESS, SASS, TypeScript, JSX, Markdown, and more as well. While I only mentioned JavaScript so far, technically Prettier can do more than just JavaScript.

For instance, Prettier will make a short const array declaration a one liner, but a declaration with a bunch of items in the array, it will split out into multiple lines to avoid horizontal scrolling (see demo GIF at the end). It makes some “logical” choices that I would make myself.

One of the things I love about it is it’s not completely rigid with its rules. Prettier takes JavaScript code in, runs some of its formatting rules against it, and then spits out that JavaScript code with its formatting rules applied. Prettier is an open source project (originally started by James Long) that is an opinionated JavaScript formatter. I’d like to take that one step further and mention how you can combine that with the Prettier – Javascript Formatter plugin for VS Code to make a really nice editing experience. In my last post, I mentioned a tip to using the Format on Save option in VS Code.

Visual studio code format document