Nested ternary formatting - add indents back

Edit: I will no longer be actively participating in this thread - my reasons are explained in comments below.

Hello,

there are many - including me thinking that change to nested ternary is not best decision.

Eg threads https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/5476 https://github.com/prettier/prettier/issues/3018

I know there is some reasoning why nested ternary indent was removed, but it’s much harder to read code now.

At least would be good to have option to remain nice formatting (from previous prettier version) - formatting of ternaries with indent and not under each other like:

condition
  ? a
  : b
  ? c
  : d

instead much easier to understand and read is:

condition
  ? a
  : b
    ? c
    : d

[gaearon]

The thing that concerns me is that I don’t think it’s a purely stylistic preference. It erases the logical structure where one is implied. Reconstructing it from a flat list of punctuation marks where every “question” goes after : (but every ? means a truthy case) is pretty challenging unless you already know what the code is doing. Ternary is already very terse and frankly I was relying on its nesting structure a lot when reading. So it seems to me like it needs to be more strongly motivated than that it looks cleaner in some cases. I’m all for zero config btw. I just think in this case the cleanliness made comprehension significantly harder, and that makes the cleanliness not worth it to me. YMMV.

I do agree this shouldn’t be configurable. I would personally prefer it be reverted to the old behavior.

[mjackson]

Thanks for the link, @suchipi. Looks like there was a fork with a flattenTernaries option. Was that considered before making flattening the default behavior?

FWIW, here’s the largest nested ternary that I’ve ever written, in the React Router codebase. With this change it goes from:

to this:

The code was already difficult to read, but this change makes it much more so.

Edit: e.g. consider the last trailing null. Which condition is that the else for?