Format CSS with VIM like in Textmate

Question

In TextMate there is this awesome option to "Format CSS" and "Format CSS Compressed". This option doesn't seem to exist in vim. Perhaps it's in a plugin I'm not aware of? Or maybe I need to integrate CSS Tidy somehow?

Answer 1

You can integrate CSS Tidy fairly easily. Since you're coming from TextMate I'll assume you're on a Mac. If you don't already have CSS tidy installed, I'd recommend installing it via a package manager, like the excellent Homebrew.

Once it's installed, you can allow Vim to use CSS tidy for the = command, which automatically formats code, by adding the following to your ~/.vimrc:

autocmd filetype css setlocal equalprg=csstidy\ -\ --silent=true 

Now whenever you have a CSS file open, it will consult CSS Tidy to format it when you invoke the = command. Try it on an open CSS file with gg=G to format the whole document.

Consult the CSS Tidy usage guide to add any other options you like, and don't forget to escape spaces you add to the above ~/.vimrc command with \.