53.1. Formatting

Layout rules (brace positioning, etc) follow BSD conventions. In particular, curly braces for the controlled blocks of , , , etc go on their own lines.

Limit line lengths so that the code is readable in an 80-column window. (This doesn’t mean that you must never go past 80 columns. For instance, breaking a long error message string in arbitrary places just to keep the code within 80 columns is probably not a net gain in readability.)

The preferred style for multi-line comment blocks is

Note that comment blocks that begin in column 1 will be preserved as-is by pgindent, but it will re-flow indented comment blocks as though they were plain text. If you want to preserve the line breaks in an indented block, add dashes like this:

The directory contains sample settings files that can be used with the emacs, xemacs or vim editors to help ensure that they format code according to these conventions.

The text browsing tools more and less can be invoked as: