Chaining jquery statements across multiple lines

I always break chains of functions, one per line after the first function call. So this:

var $blah = $('#blah').hello('hola').goodbye('adios').tanj('no hay justicia');

becomes:

var $blah2 = $('#blah').hello('hola')
                       .goodbye('adios')
                       .tanj('no hay justicia');

BTW, I ran that exact code through JSHint (online at jshint.com) and didn't receive any errors... Just for giggles I ran it through the stricter JSLint and didn't get any errors... Not sure what switch you're toggling.

Long lines are to be avoided, but whatever js error you received before it wasn't caused by splitting chained calls onto multiple lines.

That said - be careful with whitespace.

$("#long-selector-1, #long-selector-2, #long-selector-3")
    .filter(":visible")
    .fadeOut(400, function() {
        otherDivs.show();
    });

The above is slightly easier to read purely because the fadeout function is indented such that otherDivs.show doesn't look like it's being applied to the selector.

If you use a selector which changes the scope of the call, inconsistent whitespace can make it hard to read the code at a glance.

e.g.

$('.foo')
    .highlight()
    .children()
    .hide();

makes it look like it's going to hide all the .foo of course it won't.

$('.foo')
    .highlight()
    .children()
        .hide();

This makes it a little more obvious that the hide function applies to whatever is returned by .children()

You can pull the selector out of the first call, but honestly the better question is why do you still care about the (extremely arbitrary) 80 character limit for lines? This was only important when all programmers used some sort of terminal. I'm 100% certain that you can display more than 80 characters in your IDE with some font size changes.

This is the nature of the beast when you are working with chained function calls in jQuery.