Here's my reason: if what I see on screen doesn't match the code actually being committed, that freaks me out.

Same reason I don't like using those things where <= turns into ≤ in your editor but it's written to disk as <=.

Similarly, for some languages the meaning of what is written can change based on the indentation and line breaks. Or a statement written under one formatting standard can become significantly harder to read under a different formatting standard.

There are plenty of automated formatters - clang-format, prettier, gofmt, black. You would delegate to one of them, configurable in the project/editor, and adjustable by file extension.

If the code doesn't parse, save it as-is. If it does, run the formatter with the defaults before saving. When opening, run the formatter with the user's preferences before displaying.

Gets you the benefits of a formatter, with the freedom to control your environment to your tastes. You can already pick your editor, font, and color theme. You ought to be able to pick your formatter settings too.

This invariably leads to fucked up diffs and useless blaming. In theory tabs are superior as a way to provide configurable layout but as soon as you have to collaborate between users with different tooling you end up in a mixed whitespace hellscape.

Accurate reporting of the error positions is one reason this is a non-trivial thing to implement. It's a fixable problem, just takes quite a bit of tooling and complexity for a good experience, and all things considered: is it really worth it?

Ask and receive: https://blog.jetbrains.com/idea/2022/11/intellij-idea-2022-3...

IMO, the fact that personalization isn't more widespread is good evidence that code style doesn't actually matter. Humans adapt. So long as it doesn't actually interfere with the function of writing code (eg mixed tabs & spaces; wildly inconsistent identifier names), your reader will get over it quickly after some snide comments to their friends on IRC, and then work on the actual work that needs doing. I think people spend too much thought on this topic.