if only whitespace was treated as such visually, and the IDE would serialize to whatever the repository uses, and similarly for YAML-JSON.

> Now that terrible text editors won

yes. but not all hope is lost, maybe AGI helps/wipes us out!

Considering that we lost tabs because some peoples text editors and web browsers rendered them as 8 spaces, and drew the wrong conclusion, I don't have much hope for your plan.

However I would be completely on board if we could agree on a formatting configuration file that people could check into a repo for IDEs to pick up.

I think we've mostly agreed on editorconfig[1], though it doesn't concern itself with language-specific formatting - it's even built into a lot of editors.

For language-specific formatting, you can run formatters in pre-commit-hooks and CI. Treefmt[2] can help with that if you want to cover a lot of languages in your repo.

1. https://editorconfig.org/

2. https://github.com/numtide/treefmt

I'll have to check out EditorConfig.

It looks like IntelliJ supports it, so that could cut down on the amount of work required to get it in a project.