Formatting

This page is mainly for contributers to this repository and describes a set of rules that all files must follow. This ensures readability, visibility and clarity of changes and/or features while at the same time providing a clean and uniform overview of the whole project.

If you find inconsitencies against these rules, don't hesitate to fix it or let us know!

Indentation and File Endings

Probably an unpopular opinion, but we prefer tab indentation over space indentation.

Each file must end with an empty line.

Folder Structure

Directory Tree

There are 4 main directories:

• docs: The root for all documentation and wiki, except for the obvious README.md, CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md and CONTRIBUTING.md
• main: Contains the main application and code.
• tests: While GraphDonkey is not tested enough, the very few tests that exist must be located here.
• vendor: All additional and external files can be found here. They are included in the bundled executable. These include:
  • icons: The set of icons used, which is the submodule qtango at this current point in time.
  • plugins: The set of plugins installed
  • styles: The styles used for the app. Any user-specific styles are located here as well.
  • ui: GraphDonkey makes use of the uic compiler from Qt. This folder contains all the *.ui files that are used to build the layout.

Python Modules

While it's not important how modules are created, we prefer not using folders that only contain a single __init__.py file.

MarkDown Files

In general, markdown files don't require any thought, but if you decide to add some, it is expected that each line does not span over 100 characters.

Python Files

Docstrings

Python files themselves must start with a docstring """...""". The first line of this docstring must be a short description of the file, followed by an empty line, followed by a longer description thereof. They must be ended with an Author and a Date reference. These references are followed by a colon and then a tab, before they are given their values.

"""Short Description

This is my long description of this file. Notice how there is
preferred to have many short lines over few long ones. Each
such line should be approximately indented on both sides (for
as far that's possible).

Author: Some Name Here
Date:   MM/DD/YYYY
"""

Notice how the date format is in MM/DD/YYYY, where MM represents a month by number (two values, Januari is 01), DD represents a day in two digits and YYYY represents the usual 4-digit year.

Exceptions can be made for empty python files, as long as there is a short description as to why it's empty (see __init__.py for an example).

Imports

Imports may take any number of forms. The only import that is required to be formatted validly is the import of the constant values.

from main.extra import Constants