[ckdot2]

Not far. Just show all changes. Like the blog article already states, for many projects you already have code formatters, so changes in format usually don’t happen a lot - and if they do there might be a reason you don’t want to hide (like… you change your rules of code formatting). For all the other example I neither see the point why you would want to hide it. If you don’t want to see commas added in a list, make it a rule that the comma always has to be appended after the last element. Most languages allow that. Semantic equivalence? The JS example isn’t even equivalent because „this“ may have a different context. I’d prefer to have a „dumb“ diff that simply shows all the changes instead of adding these kind of complexities. Just keep your MRs small and there’s no real issue.

[HelloNurse]

The healthy workflow is: notice formatting discrepancies -> reformat -> reopen the diff, now containing only intentional, substantial changes.

Of course the edited source files should have been reformatted automatically, on save or on build, before someone opens a diff: this should never happen except as a symptom of inadequate reformatting (e.g. I decide to adopt redundant commas at the end of comma-separated lists) or abnormal operations (e.g. non-reformatted code was accidentally committed to version control).