Prettier
Ranked 4 of 7 code formatters by recommenders
Widely used formatter giving consistent, deterministic style automatically across projects. Critics find it slow, rigid, and hard to configure; some prefer Oxfmt.
Widely used formatter giving consistent, deterministic style automatically across projects. Critics find it slow, rigid, and hard to configure; some prefer Oxfmt.
26 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 16
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 62%
Recommended in 8 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 16 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 1.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 8 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Standard, deterministic formatting rules
“Formatting should be handled by deterministic tools with formally specified rules like prettier.”
Comment from 7 May 2026 in “Appearing Productive in the Workplace” “defer to a standard formatting tool such as prettier”
Comment from 7 Jun 2026 in “Stop Using Conventional Commits” “It's easily fixed with a formatter like prettier”
Comment from 20 Oct 2026 in “SlopCodeBench 10/2026 – Opus 5.5, Astra wins overall, xhigh considered harmful” Used as a quality gate
“The ESLint, Prettier, strict TS, Knip (dead code detection), and Vitest configs act as quality gates.”
Comment from 17 Feb 2026 in “Show HN: I built a tool to un-dumb Claude Code's CLI output (Local Log Viewer)” “Occasionally I use prettier to remove indentation - the LLM makes a lot less edit errors that way.”
Comment from 9 Apr 2026 in “Reallocating $100/Month Claude Code Spend to Zed and OpenRouter”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Hard to configure or extend
“Stuff like Prettier is purposely unconfigurable and leads to the unreadability of JS code across the ecosystem.”
Comment from 31 Dec 2025 in “Five Years of Tinygrad” “Prettier's plugin API is one of the worst APIs I've ever worked with.”
Comment from 2 Jul 2026 in “Vite+ Beta” “you need to load a different set of prettier rules”
Comment from 26 Jul 2026 in “Ruff v0.16.0 – Significant new updates – 413 default rules up from 59”
Other code formatters people recommend
The four most recommended other code formatters, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| gofmt | 26 | 5 | 84% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Black | 18 | 6 | 75% | 6 | — | Approved |
| FracturedJson | 18 | 2 | 90% | 2 | — | — |
| PrettierThis page | 16 | 10 | 62% | 8 | — | — |
| Oxfmt | 14 | 9 | 61% | 6 | — | — |
What people said
25 of the 28 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“eslint/prettier with oxlint/oxfmt”
“It's easily fixed with a formatter like prettier”
“it's tiring that it's yet another dependency to remember to add and configure in a new node project”
“the OCD-afflicted prettier”
“Oxfmt instead of prettier.”
“you need to load a different set of prettier rules”
“prettier -> oxfmt (but in rust, and fast)”
“I find 90% of the times the code is actually uglier when using it.”
“Prettier's plugin API is one of the worst APIs I've ever worked with.”
“native replacements for eslint and prettier”
“defer to a standard formatting tool such as prettier”
“the time to process a codebase went from like way over a minute with the old tools”
“Formatting should be handled by deterministic tools with formally specified rules like prettier.”
“Occasionally I use prettier to remove indentation - the LLM makes a lot less edit errors that way.”
“running ESLint and Prettier on your project and having a full build and formatting iteration take like 2 minutes”
“you would have to drag me kicking and screaming back to ESLint and Prettier”
“I feel the same way about tools like ESLint and Prettier”
“I've never been bothered by the performance of standard tooling”
“The ESLint, Prettier, strict TS, Knip (dead code detection), and Vitest configs act as quality gates.”
“Throw away Prettier’s Markdown formatting, by the way, it’s terrible”
“Stuff like Prettier is purposely unconfigurable and leads to the unreadability of JS code across the ecosystem.”
“I was trying to tell someone to use prettier, the specific program”
“in my experience it's much better than the alternative”
“but it does fix unquoted keys, floats, trailing comma, and single”
“Prettier always rewrites the entire file from scratch with the parsed AST”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.