C# occupies a lot of horizontal space. Pretty much every file has a namespace, which by default adds 4 characters, and then another 4 characters from the actual class you are trying to define.

Take a look at this GitHub screenshot on my laptop for a simple pull request:

The getters and setters for the property had to be wrapped, because the lines are too long.

Since I had some spare time during today’s ML developers summit in Google Kirland, I decided to fix it. And it ended up pretty easy to do.

After cloning Roslyn and firing up Roslyn.sln in Visual Studio, I quickly found a property named IndentSwitch-bla-bla in the code. (I knew what to search for, as there’s an option already for indenting switch contents in Visual Studio).

Searching for references to this property gave back only about 10 places, of which only one was an actual implementation in the Roslyn formatting engine. As it turned out, I only needed to add a simple if branch that skips indent procedure for a certain AST node type: NamespaceDeclarationSyntax if the option is turned off. The rest of the changes are unit tests, and view model construction to actually show a setting in Visual Studio.

All that took under an hour. Check out the result: pull request.

Once it is released with Visual Studio, I am planning to switch that setting off on my machines and in .editorconfig.