When else in Kotlin does nothing

I just wanted to share a quick note on some ways we handle the case where the else branch has to do… NOTHING.

Sometime you find yourself in a situation where you open a when expression but you only care about certain branches. What happens with the else branch?

Some people just open and close brackets:

else -> {}

Some others use Unit:

else -> Unit

Others get really fancy with their comments:

else -> {/* Do nothing*/}

A nicer way to do this is just take the advantage of typealiases, this way we have the same logic as using Unit and the readability of a comment line:

typealias DoNothing = Unit

This way we can use it like this:

else -> DoNothing

And that’s it, just a quick tip for the common android developer.