JavaScript Styleguide

If you're visiting from the internet, feel free to learn from our style. This is a guide we use for our own apps internally at GitHub. We encourage you to setup one that works for your own team.

Coding Style

CoffeeScript

• Write new JS in CoffeeScript.
• Use soft-tabs with a two space indent.
• Always use camelCase, never underscores.
• Use implicit parentheses when possible.
• Follow @jashkenas's style. See the documentation for good examples.
• Any top level objects should be namespaced under the GitHub namespace.
• Don't ever use $.get or $.post. Instead use $.ajax and provide both a success handler and an error handler.
• Use $.fn.on instead of $.fn.bind, $.fn.delegate and $.fn.live.

Existing JavaScript

• Avoid adding new .js files.
• Use soft-tabs with a two space indent.
• Do your best to never use a semicolon. This means avoiding them at line breaks and avoiding multi-statement lines. For more info, read Mislav's blog post.

Documentation

Use TomDoc to the best of your ability. Since we do a lot of DOM caching and such, I don't think it's plausable to strictly keep to it (and document every single method/property).

Selectors

Try to prefix all javascript-based selectors with js-. This is taken from slightly obtrusive javascript. The idea is that you should be able to tell a presentational class from a functional class. Most of the codebase doesn't do this, let's try and move toward it.