This here is a collection of reasons why I genuinely, viscerally dislike Prettier. There’s nothing “pretty” about any of this, and it’s not really “the same” either. It’s just deterministically ugly for everyone in exactly the same way — that’s its only real benefit: eliminating arbitrary cosmetic diffs and drift.
Human evolution has optimized us to be exceptionally good at recognizing visual patterns. Our perception is highly sensitive to similarity, symmetry, proximity, alignment and predictable grouping (Gestalt principles).
Therefore indentation, grouping and alignment become cognitive shortcuts.
When a formatter breaks these (e.g., awkward line wrapping, misaligned constructs (e.g. operators)), it increases cognitive parsing cost, even if the code is technically “consistent.”
On the other hand, Prettier's goal was never optimizing for readability. Its design goals were:
- eliminate formatting debates
- enforce consistency
- reduce diff noise
Gestalt Principles