Lugging a node_modules folder larger than the size of my website and installing a JavaScript package manager to get something as simple as an HTML formatter carries too much software complexity.
A less bloated alternative is Tidy. I decided against switching since it doesn't result in the same style of indentation and line wrapping as Prettier.
More recently, I considered how many websites I visit use Prettier's code style. Later, I realized even prettier.io's HTML, including its page highlighting its users, doesn't follow its format! The author of Prettier doesn't use it for his own website. If the author doesn't care, why should I?
Options
After making the switch, the options I use for Tidy are as follows:
tidy -mq -wrap --tidy-mark no
- -m: modify the input files
- -q: suppress unnecessary output
- -wrap: don't wrap text when a column number is not provided
- --tidy-mark: whether to add a meta tag to show that Tidy was used
I disable Tidy's line wrapping because I find it ugly, as shown below.
<p>paragraph wrapped</p>
I would rather that it look more like this:
<p> paragraph wrapped </p>
I also don't use Tidy's automatic indentation since it spreads out short lines, turning this
<li><a href="/">Home</a></li> <li><a href="/links">Links</a></li>
into this less readable version.
<li> <a href="/">Home</a> </li> <li> <a href="/links">Links</a> </li>
No indentation means the added benefit of smaller file sizes.
Speed Comparison
Running bun prettier -w . with printWidth set to 130 after my local copy of the website's files were formatted using Tidy resulted in 1.76s user 0.15s system 179% cpu 1.066 total.
Running it again, meaning no files needed to be changed, resulted in 1.76s user 0.20s system 140% cpu 1.393 total.
Running find -name "*.html" -exec tidy -mq -wrap --tidy-mark no {} \; with the files formatted using Prettier resulted in 0.02s user 0.04s system 88% cpu 0.068 total.
Running the command again resulted in 0.02s user 0.03s system 97% cpu 0.050 total.
This means that Tidy can format my website's HTML around fifteen times faster than Prettier.
Conclusion
Don't let small differences stop you from switching to more minimal software.