Why not but pretty much all Go editors are "wired" to gofmt (on save) and/or should be (otherwise the build fail here anyway), so it's more a nice-to-have than a requirement.

/cc @thaJeztah @dnephin @justincormack

@vdemeester yeap, but there are also shell scripts and other kinds of files... I thought it would be useful to have them all under the same kind of format rules...

/cc @tianon too 👼

IMO what is more valuable is a tool to enforce style as a git hook. I use http://pre-commit.com/ with https://gist.github.com/dnephin/c7776ecb5cdcf02eb1a6 to ensure that formatting is correct.

If we're going to add this, it's probably more appropriate under contrib/ somewhere, instead of the root of the repo. We can add .editorconfig to .gitignore so that developers can customize their copy as they want.

I'm wondering if this falls in the same category as https://github.com/docker/docker/blob/389d5cde7b5474cd33d251aadc96be1f0bdbc711/.gitignore#L2-L3

True, we don't need to add it to .gitignore.

Yeah, I agree -- this is useful information, and it's nice to see folks trying to standardize the way it's communicated, but I don't think the standard is firm enough yet that committing this at the top-level is warranted (perhaps more prudent once/if more editors start supporting this file out-of-the-box or if it becomes more common). contrib/ seems like a great place for it (contrib/editorconfig, for example, so that it's not hiding and is easy to find and symlink to .editorconfig if folks want to use it via something simple like ln -s contrib/editorconfig .editorconfig).

@tianon @thaJeztah @justincormack @vdemeester Done, what do you guys think?

LGTM 👍

Thanks 👍

I just learned something that changed my opinion on this. github actually supports .editorconfig!
You can see an example of it working here: https://github.com/go-swagger/go-swagger/blob/master/cmd/swagger/commands/initcmd.go

So if we set

[*]
indent_size = 4

Viewing code and diffs will show 4 space tabs instead of 8 space tabs.

I would be in favor of moving this out of contrib and back into the root of the repo so that we can have nicer looking code and diffs on github.

@dnephin that's nice! Is it only indent size that's taken into account, no other "side effects"?

I'm not sure, there doesn't seem to be much information out there about it. http://stackoverflow.com/a/33899831/444646 suggests that they never officially announced the support.

I suspect it does support any options that make sense from the UI. Maybe they apply to the in-browser editor as well.

Honestly, I kinda like that GitHub shows tabs at 8 spaces because it makes it much more obvious when someone screws it up in a PR because the 4-real-space-indents don't line up properly. 😇

Oh, you've got a point, it has helped me as well (if only GitHub had a show whitespace option)

Shouldn't we have automated style checks for that instead of relying on a human to notice it?

http://pre-commit.com/ with https://gist.github.com/dnephin/c7776ecb5cdcf02eb1a6 is a great option.

That would be good, however, I can imagine there's combinations that are harder to validate strictly