Chapter XII. Development guidelines

1. Indenting and formating style
2. Naming
3. Declaring procedures
4. Header files
5. New files
6. File reference
7. Patches
8. Translations
8.1. Introduction
8.2. PO files basics
8.3. Shortcut keys
8.4. How to contribute
9. Some tips
10. Making releases
11. Useful stuff

Work hard but have fun!

1. Indenting and formating style

Indenting can be done with the indent command line tool. Bluefish uses tabs - not spaces, and I'll explain why.

Some programmers prefer a lot of indenting, 8 characters, some prefer less, 3 characters. If Bluefish code was indented with spaces, these programmers had a problem, they would have to change the files to view it in their favourite layout. But because we use tabs, these programmers can simply set the tab width to a different value, and without changing the files it looks good for both programmers!

To indent properly with indent, issue this command:

$ indent --line-length 100 --k-and-r-style --tab-size 4 \
-bbo --ignore-newlines bluefishcode.c

Comment all public functions like it is done in bf_lib.c and gtk_easy.c (javadoc style, with some small differences), this can be used to create a function reference.