Can comrak format directories recursively?

[bioinformatist]

Just as cargo fmt behaves.

Since most users prefer comrak for blogging rather than Rust development, it may not be suitable for them.

Perhaps we can provide the function via a parameter such as -r.

[kivikakk]

I'd be happy to accept such a feature. There are some questions to be pondered, though:

1. What file extensions would such a recursive option look for? Not every .md file is necessarily CommonMark, and there's a variety of other extensions used for Markdown, any of which may or may not be CommonMark. Doing an in-place format of non-CommonMark Markdown files would change their meaning.
2. Comrak takes many options. Accidentally doing an in-place format without the correct options for a given set of documents would alter them in a way that can't be easily reversed. Of course, we'd hope that users would have version control etc. and could mitigate such issues, but I think it highlights (in addition with (1)) the dangers of treating it like a code-formatting tool: it's a far cry from go fmt (which takes no configuration whatsoever), and we don't have a standard configuration file like rustfmt.toml. (We do have a config file, but it specifies only command-line arguments, which are not versioned and therefore don't represent a stable interface.)
3. We might want a single file in-place formatting mode first. Comrak doesn't take any "subcommands", so we'd probably want something like comrak -i FILE which is equivalent to comrak FILE -t commonmark -o FILE.

[kivikakk]

Also;

Since most users prefer comrak for blogging rather than Rust development, it may not be suitable for them.

I'm not so sure about that. Comrak is heavily depended-upon in crates.io; I don't have any figures for how many folks are invoking it directly at the CLI, but I'd be surprised if it was anywhere near as many as direct + indirect library users.

[bioinformatist]

We might want a single file in-place formatting mode first. Comrak doesn't take any "subcommands", so we'd probably want something like comrak -i FILE which is equivalent to comrak FILE -t commonmark -o FILE.

I agree with it. Do you mind if I implement it? Also, do you think we can make Comrak a formatter for VS code (an extension like Black, Prettier, etc.) by this mode?

Then we can call Comrak for a specific file by CMD + Shift + P -> Format Document. This may be an alternative approach avoids issue (1) and (2).

[kivikakk]

I agree with it. Do you mind if I implement it?

That would be lovely; thank you!

Also, do you think we can make Comrak a formatter for VS code (an extension like Black, Prettier, etc.) by this mode?

Yep, that should be relatively(?) simple! I don't know the exact procedure for making such an extension, but I imagine we'd either supply binaries for the relevant architectures, or even use WASM for this (we already do a WASM build as part of CI) — presumably there are other VS Code extensions that do similar.