Suggestion: New rule categories

[andy-hanson]

The current rule categories are "typescript", "functionality", "maintainability", and "style".

I would propose two new categories:

ban-syntax

These are rules that just ban a particular type of syntax (e.g. the null keyword). I listed these in #2497.

format

These are rules that just affect the layout of code (the many whitespace rules) or particular choice of tokens used (e.g. single or double quotes). If someone were already using a code formatter, they could turn off all of these rules.

These are:

• typedef-whitespace
• eofline
• indent
• linebreak-style
• max-line-length
• trailing-comma
• align
• arrow-parens
• import-spacing
• jsdoc-format
• newline-before-return
• new-parens
• no-consecutive-blank-lines
• no-irregular-whitespace
• no-trailing-whitespace
• number-literal-format
• one-line
• quotemark
• semicolon
• whitespace

[andy-hanson]

Instead of ban-syntax I'm thinking there should just be ban, which would include rules like "ban", "ban-type" and "import-blacklist". Whether the banned thing is "syntax" is relevant only to the implementation, and calling it "ban-syntax" would make people think "quotemark" belongs there (which bans a single-quote "syntax").
On the other hand, a rule like "switch-case-fall-through" would "ban" fallthrough, but wouldn't belong in that category. Only rules that ban a particular feature would count, not rules that ban certain ways of using features.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

It's been quite a while without activity here. Per #4534, closing as aged away.