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by PurplePanda 2915 days ago
what's the point of that?

it takes a while to learn how to use your text editor well, and everyone is probably good at a different one. but they all pretty well have the ability to produce the same result, so why bother forcing one?

it's better to (have a tool that can) specify what the end result should look like and let people work the way that they are good at.

2 comments

In my team everyone uses IntelliJ Ultimate with the same settings.xml file. We all have the same automatic tasks that happen on each commit: reformat code, optimize imports, check TODOs, perform SonarLint analysis. This has greatly reduced frustrated merge-requests filled with unimportant details such as code formatting and newlines. It has also greatly improved the code quality because it will warn you that you left a TODO in the code or that a certain method could also be private before you commit the code into the repo.

Nobody has a problem with this, although in the Java world every corporate developer uses IntelliJ anyway. A couple of legacy project teams are still on Eclipse.

Agreed. Plus now many editors obey the same .editorconfig files; and for those that don't, .editorconfig can be used as a reference for developers to configure their own working environment.

I can understand wanting to standardize in a company with a 1000-person engineering org, where maybe it's harder to enforce that everyone uses the same conventions if there's no standardization in tools; but in a team of a few dozen, you should only be hiring people you trust anyway, and communicating with them about why small things like this are important.