The auto-formatting story is half baked I think. As far as I know most language have a formatter that goes only one way, which is an improvement over having no formatter at all.

What we're missing is good tools to go from the standard format to a personalized format. For example, I was working on JavaScript recently and the team was using prettier with 2 space indentation. I found that somewhat hard to work with because of some minor vision issues, it was becoming a bit of an accessibility issue for me, but I was already viewed as a bit of a troublemaker at the company and pushing everyone to change their style wasn't going to help me any.

I tried to find a tool that would reformat the code for me without altering the repository but couldn't find an easy solution.

So we have formatters that go from "everyone's personal style" to a standard style. But our tools for going the other direction, from standard style to "my personal style" are lacking. (Hoping to be proved wrong on this point.)

[–] cycoder@programming.dev 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You could just have your own local prettier rules which will format things how you want while you work on them, then use something like lint-staged to run the standard prettier rules for your org on commit. That way you work how you wish, and the project gets the files how they wish.

[–] delmain@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Your situation is why tabs are the clearly superior solution. Anyone on the team can just set their tab-width in their editor to whatever they want, and everything is consistent for everyone.

[–] Michael0x18@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Unless you're using them to align things. Then it matters. (Like comments)