[happymellon]

The tabs/spaces war was fought because of IDE choices that restricted your ability for sane tab rendering defaults, and simple overriding of tab size.

Now that terrible text editors won, I have to watch a 2 Vs 4 space war.

If only we could have a character that could represent indentation and people could set the rendering so they can visualise it in their own preferred way.

And folks who want to remove braces should be pointed to the Apple certificate snafu.

[pas]

if only whitespace was treated as such visually, and the IDE would serialize to whatever the repository uses, and similarly for YAML-JSON.

> Now that terrible text editors won

yes. but not all hope is lost, maybe AGI helps/wipes us out!

[happymellon]

Considering that we lost tabs because some peoples text editors and web browsers rendered them as 8 spaces, and drew the wrong conclusion, I don't have much hope for your plan.

However I would be completely on board if we could agree on a formatting configuration file that people could check into a repo for IDEs to pick up.

[turboponyy]

I think we've mostly agreed on editorconfig[1], though it doesn't concern itself with language-specific formatting - it's even built into a lot of editors.

For language-specific formatting, you can run formatters in pre-commit-hooks and CI. Treefmt[2] can help with that if you want to cover a lot of languages in your repo.

1. https://editorconfig.org/

2. https://github.com/numtide/treefmt

[happymellon]

I'll have to check out EditorConfig.

It looks like IntelliJ supports it, so that could cut down on the amount of work required to get it in a project.