Prettier formats JavaScript beautifully. It also handles TypeScript, CSS, and HTML reasonably well. But the moment you work on a Laravel project — which means PHP, Blade templates, and vanilla JS all in one codebase — you run into friction.
Prettier doesn't format PHP natively. There's a community plugin (@prettier/plugin-php) but it can produce unexpected results with certain Blade-embedded PHP constructs. For Blade templates specifically, there's a separate extension called shufo/blade-formatter. If you're using SCSS, you might have a third extension or a Prettier plugin for that too.
By the time you've configured three formatters to not conflict with each other, you've spent 30 minutes on tooling instead of code.
The specific gap I was filling
I work primarily with:
- Laravel Blade (PHP + HTML + Blade directives mixed)
- Vanilla HTML
- JavaScript / TypeScript
- SCSS
No single formatter I tried handled all four consistently. The indent rules varied. Blade directive indentation was completely ignored by Prettier. And Prettier's HTML formatting (wrapping attributes across multiple lines) wasn't always what I wanted for template files.
The decision to build
The core formatter I needed wasn't that complex: a line-by-line parser that tracks indent level, applies language-specific rules for opening and closing constructs, handles comments, and outputs re-indented code. This is a well-understood algorithm — the complexity is in the edge cases.
I decided to build it as a proper VS Code extension rather than a script, so it integrates with Format on Save and Format Document like any other formatter. The result is mkhCodeFormatter: one extension, one consistent formatting behavior, across the entire Laravel full-stack.
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Mustafa Kamal Hossain
Founder & Principal Engineer at Manfi. Passionate about Laravel, SaaS architecture, and high-performance engineering.