Coding Style Conventions ======================== Coding style guidelines are about reducing the number of unnecessary reformatting patches and making things easier for developers to work together. You don't have to like them or even agree with them, but once put in place we all have to abide by them (or vote to change them). However, coding style should never outweigh coding itself and so the guidelines described here are hopefully easy enough to follow as they are very common and supported by tools and editors. The basic style for C code is the Linux kernel coding style [1] with one excecption, we use 4 spaces instead of tabs. This closely matches what most libssh developers use already anyways, with a few exceptions as mentioned below. To shorthen this here are the highlights: * Maximum line width is 80 characters The reason is not about people with low-res screens but rather sticking to 80 columns prevents you from easily nesting more than one level of if statements or other code blocks. * Use 4 spaces to indent * No trailing whitespaces * Follow the K&R guidelines. We won't go through all of them here. Do you have a copy of "The C Programming Language" anyways right? Editors ======== VIM ---- set ts=4 sw=4 et cindent For Vim, the following settings in $HOME/.vimrc will also deal with displaying trailing whitespace: if has("syntax") && (&t_Co > 2 || has("gui_running")) syntax on function! ActivateInvisibleCharIndicator() syntax match TrailingSpace "[ \t]\+$" display containedin=ALL highlight TrailingSpace ctermbg=Red endf autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead * call ActivateInvisibleCharIndicator() endif " Show tabs, trailing whitespace, and continued lines visually set list listchars=tab:»·,trail:·,extends:… " highlight overly long lines same as TODOs. set textwidth=80 autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.c,*.h exec 'match Todo /\%>' . &textwidth . 'v.\+/' [1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle