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This just gave me an idea. I’ve been on teams like this. I’ve also been on teams at the other extreme, where formatting nit picking took up the vast majority of

This just gave me an idea. I’ve been on teams like this. I’ve also been on teams at the other extreme, where formatting nit picking took up the vast majority of review. The former is obviously painful because poorly formatted code is a constant mental burden. But it’s also true that unrelated formatting changes can present a similar mental burden and make meaningful changes harder to identify. The latter can detract from more meaningful review. But prioritizing better formatting consistently keeps a codebase more manageable over time. This is somewhere tooling can help, more than it already does. Automated linting/formatting is great. Depending when it’s applied, and how effective its automation, it can potentially defer the burden til review time. But there’s still a lot of room for improvement there. Many diff tools present an “ignore whitespace” option. I would like to see this taken two steps further: 1. Better language syntax awareness could go beyond whitespace as formatting-specific “noise”. I know there’s work in this direction and it’s great too. Besides making it more available and complete... 2. “Ignore” is probably not the best option. Ideally tooling can also identify these two sets of changes so they can be both viewed, and more importantly merged separately. The problem right now is that formatting is noise pretty much everywhere one might interact with a project. Making it a distinct set of changes at the diff and history level would help significantly.

Minor49er 6y ago
That would certainly help to curb the problem. On the flip side of that, a couple of things that have helped to stop it before it gets to that level are to ask the developers to enable "auto-trim whitespace" and to enable the option to show whitespace and/or hidden characters. Most editors can do these things. They go a long way toward stomping out the problem, even if auto-formatters aren't being used. Highlighting trailing spaces are an option in git diffs too, though the devs who submit them typically don't look at their own diffs after they've pushed them (at least in my experience)

Minor49er 6y ago

That would certainly help to curb the problem. On the flip side of that, a couple of things that have helped to stop it before it gets to that level are to ask the developers to enable "auto-trim whitespace" and to enable the option to show whitespace and/or hidden characters. Most editors can do these things. They go a long way toward stomping out the problem, even if auto-formatters aren't being used. Highlighting trailing spaces are an option in git diffs too, though the devs who submit them typically don't look at their own diffs after they've pushed them (at least in my experience)