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Comment by rolisz | Hacker News Reader

I just tried enabling that this week, but I found that I often press Ctrl-S out of habit, even when I have syntactically invalid code and then the autoformatter messes things up royally and I get lost. For now, I just memorized the shortcut for autoformatting and I'm running it manually when I feel the need to "tidy up" the code.

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Mine won't do any auto-formatting when the syntax is invalid, so when I hit CMD + S and it _doesn't_ format it's a cue to start looking for errors.

The only issue I have with this is that I wish it would chirp more loudly when there's a syntax error.

Every so often I don't notice red underline and I begin wondering why my autoformatter and autocomplete aren't working anymore.

Maybe a red border or something any time a file's syntax is invalid.

I’m a big fan of Error Lens.

I’m curious what language you’re working on and what formatter it uses? In my experience many formatters will not run if the AST is invalid.

I'm using Python and PyCharm. It happily underlines the invalid syntax and then reformats things more or less randomly.

There is a package called „black“ (pip install black) that formats code according to PEP8 (most of the time). You might take a look if you’re interested. I’m using it occasionally and it didn’t do anything royally stupid until now. If the code isn’t syntactically correct it won’t run.

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