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Comment by dingnuts | Hacker News Reader

ok call me a spoiled Go programmer but I have had an allergy to manually formatting code since getting used to gofmt on save. I highly recommend setting up an autoformatter so you can write nasty, undented code down the left margin and have it snap into place when you save the file like I do, and never touch tab for indent. Unless you're writing Python of course haha

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Format on save is my worst enemy. It may work fine for go, but you'll eventually run into code where it isn't formatted using the one your editor is configured for. Then, you end up formatting the whole file or having to remember how to disable save formatting. I check formatting as a git hook on commits instead.

If you’re checking it on git hooks then it’s even safer to have format on save. Personally I default to format on save, and if I’m making a small edit to a file that is formatted differently, and it would cause a messy commit to format on save, then I simply “undo” and then “save without formatting” in the VSCode command palette.

We have format commits so that we have separate non-logic commits that don't have to be aggravated over if we find files are all off.

You can also add those non-logic commits to a .git-blame-ignore-revs file, and any client that supports it will ignore those commits when surfacing git blame annotations. I believe GitHub supports this but not sure. I think VSCode does…

The problem with autoformatting is that whitespace is a part of the program. I use whitespace to separate logical entities that cannot be made their own functions in an elegant way. Using autoformatters often breaks this, changing my code to something that looks good but doesn't actually make sense.

The more gentle autoformatters actually do their job correctly, but the more aggressive ones make code harder to read. And BTW, I hate golang with a passion. It's a language designed to get fifty thousand bootcamp grads from developing countries to somehow write coherent code. I just don't identify with that, although I do understand why it needs to exist.

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