A sufficiently-motivated engineer could do this today by setting a different formatter in their editor than in their pre-commit hook. Then they need only activa

A sufficiently-motivated engineer could do this today by setting a different formatter in their editor than in their pre-commit hook. Then they need only activate the formatter in their editor as they edit, and ensure pre-commit hooks run as they commit. This saves you the trouble of authoring a separate programming language, or finding a way to preserve all of the niceties of the original syntax and formatting that wouldn't directly translate to an AST (like how many newlines are after a particular stanza or function). Case in point: Recast (https://github.com/benjamn/recast https://github.com/benjamn/recast) is of particular interest with regards to JS/TS in this vein, because it does preserve a lot of the spirit of the source in its conception of the AST. But also last time I used it (couple years ago now) it would explode on any code with an emoji in it. It's genuinely not an easy problem.