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Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

> Any configuration format that cannot be auto-formatted (i.e. has significant whitespace) goes straight in the trash. 90% of my time spent with YAML is usually trying to figure out if something is indented correctly.

What are you talking about, exactly? If I hit alt+L in IntelliJ, my YAML file is auto-formatted.

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Indentation changes the structure of the data. There is no deterministic way to auto format YAML, you have to make sure, as a human, that everything is at the right indentation level

   - something
     - a
     - b

Is completely different to:

   - something
     - a
       - b

what about stopping the little darf who writes into your files unauthorizedly?

It can be deterministically auto-formatted as long as you respect the format, like with everything. If you wrongly indent a line then it’s your fault and the auto-format can’t know if some indent is wrong or not. I don’t see what’s wrong here; it’s like adding a superfluous } in JSON or not closing a tag in XML.

It complicates moving stuff around the hierarchy.

Problem is that it's pretty easy to have "wrong" whitespace that'll get formatted to something different than you expected.

Using IntelliJ to edit YAML files is a bit much

> Using IntelliJ to edit YAML files is a bit much

Not if those YAML files are part of a larger project, which they quite obviously are.

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