2026-06-09

My favorite Zig feature

Zig has many awesome features, but there’s one that’s absolutely no. 1 for me: zls formatting features.

Example: I was adding Oniguruma C source code files to build.zig. Relevant code looked like this:

    mod.addCSourceFiles(.{
        .root = b.path(onig_path),
        .files = &.{
            "regerror.c",
            "regparse.c",
            "regext.c",
            "regcomp.c",
            "regexec.c",
            "reggnu.c",
            // 40 more lines
        }
    });

I figured - this is fine - but I don’t like having screenful of C files.
…so I joined first 3 items. First line of the array became like this:

&.{
   "regerror.c", "regparse.c", "regext.c",
   // ...
}

Saved. You know what zls did¹? IT MADE CODE BEAUTIFUL:

    mod.addCSourceFiles(.{
        .root = b.path(onig_path),
        .files = &.{
            "regerror.c",          "regparse.c",          "regext.c",
            "regcomp.c",           "regexec.c",           "reggnu.c",
            "regenc.c",            "regsyntax.c",         "regtrav.c",
            "regversion.c",        "st.c",                "onig_init.c",
            "unicode.c",           "ascii.c",             "utf8.c",
            "utf16_be.c",          "utf16_le.c",          "utf32_be.c",
            "utf32_le.c",          "euc_jp.c",            "sjis.c",
            "iso8859_1.c",         "iso8859_2.c",         "iso8859_3.c",
            "iso8859_4.c",         "iso8859_5.c",         "iso8859_6.c",
            "iso8859_7.c",         "iso8859_8.c",         "iso8859_9.c",
            "iso8859_10.c",        "iso8859_11.c",        "iso8859_13.c",
            "iso8859_14.c",        "iso8859_15.c",        "iso8859_16.c",
            "euc_tw.c",            "euc_kr.c",            "big5.c",
            "gb18030.c",           "koi8_r.c",            "cp1251.c",
            "euc_jp_prop.c",       "sjis_prop.c",         "unicode_unfold_key.c",
            "unicode_fold1_key.c", "unicode_fold2_key.c", "unicode_fold3_key.c",
        },
    });

Small thing, but I have a thing for nicely formatted code. By the way: zls isn’t opinionated and it formats depending on where you put commas/newlines. Both pretty and flexible.

In my mind it’s ✨zig✨ now.

I have auto-formatting on save enabled ↩︎