[sennalen]

Is that really a problem that needs solving though? The easiest way to not spend time bikeshedding is to just not bikeshed. Don't make guidelines. Don't run tools to check them. Don't comment on them in PRs. None of it matters.

[kstrauser]

Historically, yes. At some point, one person who likes to work with narrow terminal windows gets fed up with long lines and starts reformatting stuff as they go. Another person with a widescreen editor hates looking at code clustered around the left edge of the screen gets fed up and starts reformatting stuff as they go. It's just a mess. You end up with PRs where it's hard to see the 3 things that changed because it contains 200 lines of "my IDE would prefer to format things this way instead".

I have never seen this not happen, barring using autoformatters. I think Go and Rust have had great success avoiding all these dumb arguments by having built-in opinionated formatters from nearly the beginning.

[zelphirkalt]

Aren't you supporting the GP's point though? If you auto-format all the things, they will likely not be right for people either, neither for the narrow terminal window, not for the widescreen full size window enjoyer. And there was energy spent on making it so, without it being a clear winner. Instead we could just be respectful and leave such things as they are, and not have to discuss this at all.

[kstrauser]

No. Auto-formatters have a way of getting people out of the mindset of arguing about it and just accepting that's the way it is. It's not that different from, say, using a compiled language instead of assembler. You and I might have differing ideas about how to write the best assembly code. If we standardize on C, it's likely neither of us will love the compiler's output, but short of outright bugs we'd move past that and go back to writing code.