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EditorConfig is fantastic. I've used it for years now across client projects, internal work, and even in educational content that I've authored.

It honestly doesn't do a lot, but what it does do is standardize on things that are easily agreed upon like line endings and tab style / width. It leaves language specific options to purpose built linters.




But if the language-based linter is also an automatic formatter, what's the benefit of editorconfig?

All mainstream languages have good formatters these days that go much deeper and understand the language.


I use editorconfig for a lot of miscellaneous file types that I don't have an autoformatter for: markdown, jsonl, ...


Isn’t the advantage that EditorConfig allows you to choose a style over the style enforced by the language? For new languages and markup files this isn’t a problem because they may have developed a style guide in conjunction with the language but older languages don’t have that benefit.


Possibly, but I don't work with any teams that use any languages that don't have their own formatters, so I don't even know which languages are still missing one.

The languages they're using are C#, TypeScript, JavaScript, Go, Python, and Ruby.




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