Godot addon: Add a way to have shared settings across a team

[uwu-420]

Hi, thanks for making this great tool!

How can I enforce format on save for the whole team working on a project? We're using your formatter with the Godot addon but right now everyone has to go into their own editor settings to enable format on save. It would be cool, if one could enable things like format on save in a file similar to .vscode/settings.json and commit it to their VCS.

Edit: Also, I think it would be a good idea to make it possible that people using different editors VSCode or Zed can apply the formatter with exactly the same config so having a file where this is stored per project would be really valuable. Maybe it's even something to put into project.godot?

[NathanLovato]

You're asking about the Godot add-on, right? You'd like a local configuration dotfile or something like this that would ship with the project and and enforce the same settings for everyone who downloads the repository? Currently there's nothing like that indeed.

This could be added to the project.godot file possibly yes, as project settings. These are really editor settings, but there's not a way to my knowledge to have shared editor settings across a team at the moment in Godot.

Could you please confirm if this works for your purpose?

• Custom project settings can be set to override the addon's default settings per project. This is shared with the project.
• If users change their editor settings, their non-default editor settings take precedence.

[uwu-420]

It's actually not only about the Godot add-on. But you're right, I think something like a local configuration file for the formatter would be really good to enforce the same formatting for everyone downloading a project repository.

Ideally, this configuration would be usable for other editors like VSCode or Zed. Maybe it could be done similar to how it's done for Python code formatting with ruff. For ruff you can use a ruff.toml (also .ruff.toml) file to configure the formatting or put it into a [tool.ruff] section in pyproject.toml. Imo that's quite convenient. Analogously, you could make the formatter read a gdscript-formatter.toml (or whatever format you like) file for the configuration or have a section for the formatter inside the project.godot file.

Although I see that it's not quite as straightforward, since Godot handles editor settings a strictly user-only, right?

I added this to project.godot

[gdquest_gdscript_formatter]

format_on_save=false
use_spaces=false
indent_size=4
safe_mode=true

but to me it seems like this is completely ignored. The format on save seems to only care about the user's editor settings. Maybe someone else can confirm, I just learned that one can manually add custom settings to the project settings. I also wonder about the default settings the add-on has. Usually, there is this circled arrow that indicates that there currently is a non-default value and clicking on the arrow changes it back to the default value. But for the formatter settings in the editor settings there is no such thing even if I change all the values.

[NathanLovato]

I see, thanks. Then, to what you're saying, for the effect to apply across editors, I think a dedicated dotfile with ini formatting would make the most sense. The formatter program itself would have to look for the file each time it runs: walk up the filesystem from the formatted file up to the closest VCS/git repository marker and load the file if present.

Then separately for the Godot addon: the addon could load that file on startup, keep the settings in memory, and use them as overrides for default addon settings.

Does that sound like it'd work for your needs?

[uwu-420]

Yeah thanks, that would already do the trick for my use case.

But I'm not in a hurry with this request of mine, so I think this issue could be used to gather more opinions from the community before coming to a conclusion.

Tbh, now that I thought more about it, I'd strongly prefer to put the formatter configuration into project.godot for several reasons:

• GDScript does not exist in a vacuum anyway, it's strongly coupled to Godot. Are there realistic scenarios where one would like to format GDScript code outside of a Godot project, meaning a scenario where there isn't a project.godot file?
• I'd argue it's easier to walk up to the closest project.godot file instead of the closest VCS/git repository marker. There's also SVN, Perforce or whatever so the latter is more difficult to maintain.
• Your suggestion about the add-on loading a separate config file on startup would have the problem of what happens when the file is manually changed while the editor is open? Using project.godot you save yourself the effort of having to implement some file watching logic because Godot would take care of that and keep the config in memory up-to-date.
• You would still get to keep the user-specific editor settings, but the ones in project.godot should override them if set. That's quite similar to how VSCode does it, meaning project (or workspace in VSCode lingo) settings override user settings. Or is the way VSCode handles settings precedence a controversial thing?

But as a con, your formatter would need to (at least partially) parse the godot.project file. I think there is no officially maintained parsing library for that so one would probably have to do some ad-hoc parsing. Not pretty but imo still tolerable.

I'm sure I haven't fully thought this through, so I'm interested what others think about this :)