[rhooke]

I enforce formatters wherever possible after working on codebases with 20+ years of people imposing their own unique opinion on where spaces and braces should go. Worse, arguing about what the spacing should be, and making noisy diffs because people change previous peoples styling.

The formatter has no opinion. It follows rules. It doesn't work perfectly everywhere. It works enough. I would argue caring about exact bespoke spacing of all code is the perfectionism you mention.

[childintime]

There is no reason why each of us can't have the formatted according to one's taste (=what works best), instead of this "communism". It's just a matter of IDE support that is lacking.

The IDE should apply user formatting preferences upon reading in the file, and apply the std formatting while writing it (with the aim of having diffs work well). That would make good use of auto-formatters.

[ketralnis]

Okay, but the IDE support is lacking so that workaround isn't available. If you want that functionality instead you'll have to (1) add it to your IDE (2) force your team to use your favourite IDE instead of their favourite IDE. Insisting on some alternate reality where you have different tools than you actually have isn't helpful

[krageon]

> communism

It's in precisely zero ways like communism and that really doesn't help the clarity of the rest of your post.

[Thaxll]

This is bad idea, so you want your code to not looks like what's in the repo?

[ketralnis]

I think it's bad without the rest of the supporting toolchain but it's not axiomatically bad. There are languages with structured editors (e.g. https://hazel.org/), people can use different tabstop settings and even just different editor colours and wrapping settings and I think we can agree that doesn't doesn't hurt anything. Enforcing an automatic formatter is more or less identical to this anyway: you can write your code using whatever style you want but what ends up in the repo is equivalent to the compiler but not identical to what you wrote. You can imagine running your own local formatter on the code before you edit it and running the global formatter afterwards and an observer being unable to tell that that's happened.

[postalrat]

Who said that?