As developers, we’ve all argued over tabs vs. spaces, indentation size, how line endings should be, and so on.

And, of course, each project you work on has different standards for these things. Because why not.

What really kills me about these different settings, and what probably kills you, is remembering to reconfigure all your editors to match the project settings. Then when you switch, reconfigure again.

The open source project EditorConfig aims to rescue you from this nightmare. Simply place an .editorconfig file in your project and your editor can pick up the settings from there. Move to the next project (which also uses .editorconfig) and everything dynamically updates.

I don’t know why this isn’t the most popular Visual Studio add-in ever.

Here’s the deal:

• Put an .editorconfig file at the root of your project.
• Read up on EditorConfig.org all of the options you can use in there. It’s pretty flexible and you can override settings at various levels in the project.
• Install a plugin for each of your editors. They support Visual Studio, Sublime Text, and several other popular editors.
• …
• Profit!

Here’s the .editorconfig I use. I like tab indentation except in view markup. We’re a Windows shop, so lines end in CRLF. I hate trailing whitespace. I also like to keep the default settings for some project/VS files.

root = true

[*]
end_of_line = CRLF
indent_style = tab
trim_trailing_whitespace = true

[*.ascx]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.aspx]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.config]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.cshtml]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.csproj]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2

[*.html]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.resx]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 2

[*.wxi]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.wxl]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

[*.wxs]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

Note there’s a recent update to the EditorConfig format that supports multiple matching, like:

[{*.wxl,*.wxs}]
indent_style = space
indent_size = 4

…but there’s a bug in the Sublime Text plugin around this so I’ve expanded those for now to maintain maximum compatibility.

I’ve added one of these to Autofac to help our contributors and us. It makes it really easy to switch from my (preferred) tab settings to use the spaces Autofac likes. No more debate, no more forgetting.

Now, get out there and standardize your editor settings!