Dependencies

In addition to a fairly recent version of bash, it's helpful to have the following tools installed:

In general, code should pass shellcheck without warnings, be formatted with shfmt (please use it with -i 4), and come with new tests and pass them when relevant.

If any of this causes you trouble, don't worry. Please submit your pull request anyway and we can work on getting it up to snuff.

General goals and non-goals

Goals

Be as batteries-included as possible. Go out of our way to just work, even if not entirely optimally, in as many situations as possible.
Support "relatively isolated" projects.
Be easy to configure.
Be clearly documented. Remember that many programmers are working in high-stress situations. Documentation that is incomplete, unclear, or cute will make things even worse for them. Use English correctly and, to the extent possible, unambiguously.

Non-goals

Wishlist

Generalize this beyond emacs
In emacs, provide a minor mode or something to use instead of .dir-locals.el, which I've always found to be very fragile
Add support for more programming languages and file formats
Clean up shell script code
Be better at "just working"
Make it easy to add "private" and alternate formatters
It should signal more clearly when the file has a syntax error, subject to the limitations set by third party tools.
Would global (per-user) customization be useful? My guess is that it'd probably be more confusing than helpful but I'm not wedded to this conclusion.
Write a doctor command to identify potential issues (you'd probably run it similarly to how you run the install script, but s/install/doctor).

Problems

It would probably be better if we wrote reformatted code to temp files and atomically renamed them. This might mean that the tool-specific programs should emit diffs rather than working silently as they currently do.
It probably doesn't work on Windows as-is.
There are probably some Linuxisms and maybe even some recentbashisms.
It doesn't work with tramp.
As long as it's written in shell, it's always going to be a little bit slow and, of course, fairly difficult to hack on. If the bulk of it were rewritten in, say, go, then some problems would go away and some new ones would be created. On balance I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not, but I'm tempted.
Stop writing files to $PROJECT_ROOT/bin; use $PROJECT_ROOT/.would-reformat/bin instead.
PROJECT_ROOT and WF_ROOT are probably too generic. Consider prefixing them, maybe with WOULD_FORMAT_.

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