HACKER Q&A
📣 aliasxneo

Alternatives to Prettier?


I've been on the hunt for a generalized formatter to handle markdown, YAML, JSON, and other common file types. All of my open source projects typically have at least markdown and YAML present. I typically employ a specialized formatter/linter for the project-specific language, but handling the other types has always been a pain.

Prettier is the closest thing I've found, even if it's primarily targeting Javascript. My biggest gripe is the dependencies that it ships with. I'd love to find a static binary that can accomplish the same thing. Any suggestions?


  👤 jbreckmckye Accepted Answer ✓
I think one tool to rule them all is a bit ambitious. There are a lot of languages to cover.

I think a non-code formatter could be a good idea though. Particularly normalising over the various dialects of Markdown.

If it doesn't exist, perhaps you should build it yourself? The easiest way to build a CLI tool as a static binary is probably with Go, although I'm not a big fan of the language. Perhaps this could be a chance to try your hand at Rust.


👤 nerdyadventurer