Many tools exist today to automatically format code, as having a consistent structure eases reading code, a significant part of programming. However, they often have fundamental limitations: being very flexible but thus with complex configuration (such as ESLint), or with simple configuration but thus being very inflexible (such as Prettier).

eglint is the best of both worlds: very flexible and with simple configuration — to specify your code style, you simply supply examples of correctly formatted code. No configuration beyond the reference file is used.

Internally, eglint uses a Concrete Syntax Tree (an extended AST) to describes both the syntax and exact structure of the whitespace. This design is language agnostic, and allows for efficiently supporting a wide variety of programming languages, a future goal.