# Prettier 16 Hacker News commenters recommended Prettier and 10 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 8 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Widely used formatter giving consistent, deterministic style automatically across projects. Critics find it slow, rigid, and hard to configure; some prefer Oxfmt. ## Why people recommend it - Standard, deterministic formatting rules (3 comments): "Formatting should be handled by deterministic tools with formally specified rules like prettier." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48046278)) "defer to a standard formatting tool such as prettier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48435261)) "It's easily fixed with a formatter like prettier" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50172641)) - Used as a quality gate (2 comments): "The ESLint, Prettier, strict TS, Knip (dead code detection), and Vitest configs act as quality gates." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47045233)) "Occasionally I use prettier to remove indentation - the LLM makes a lot less edit errors that way." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47702770)) ## What people warn about - Hard to configure or extend (3 comments): "Stuff like Prettier is purposely unconfigurable and leads to the unreadability of JS code across the ecosystem." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46441235)) "Prettier's plugin API is one of the worst APIs I've ever worked with." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48762521)) "you need to load a different set of prettier rules" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49057421)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [gofmt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/gofmt.md): 26 recommend - [Black](https://hackerapproved.com/p/black.md): 18 recommend - [FracturedJson](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fracturedjson.md): 18 recommend - [Oxfmt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/oxfmt.md): 14 recommend - [clang-format](https://hackerapproved.com/p/clang-format.md): 7 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Prettier", https://hackerapproved.com/p/prettier/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).