Coding in Style

January 27, 2026

With my blog “going public” I can finally start writing. My next step was going to be adding TailwindCSS, I started working on that and immediately noticed that my editor, neovim, applies the wrong indentation, so we are going to fix that first.

I can update the indentation configuration in neovim, but I think a much nicer option and better convention would be to set up .editorconfig.

EditorConfig

```
 $ touch .editorconfig
```

Configure EditorConfig for available file types.

diff --git a/.editorconfig b/.editorconfig
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..2a0efbf
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.editorconfig
@@ -0,0 +1,21 @@
+# EditorConfig is awesome: https://EditorConfig.org
+
+# top-most EditorConfig file
+root = true
+
+[*]
+# Unix-style newlines with a newline ending every file
+end_of_line = lf
+insert_final_newline = true
+charset = utf-8
+trim_trailing_whitespace = true
+
+[*.md]
+# Two or more spaces at the end of the line are parsed as hard line break
+trim_trailing_whitespace = false
+indent_style = space
+indent_size = 4
+
+[*.{html,css,js,yaml,yml,toml}]
+indent_style = space
+indent_size = 2

Commit our changes.

$ git add .editorconfig
$ git commit -m 'configure EditorConfig'

Neovim supports .editorconfig out of the box¹, but it doesn’t automatically enforce specified coding style. To ensure better code consistency, let’s set up pre-commit with the editorconfig-checker hook.

pre-commit

```
 $ touch .pre-commit-config.yaml
```

Add hooks

diff --git a/.pre-commit-config.yaml b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..931910f
--- /dev/null
+++ b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
@@ -0,0 +1,13 @@
+# See https://pre-commit.com for more information
+# See https://pre-commit.com/hooks.html for more hooks
+repos:
+-   repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
+    rev: v6.0.0
+    hooks:
+    -   id: check-yaml
+    -   id: check-toml
+    -   id: check-added-large-files
+-   repo: https://github.com/editorconfig-checker/editorconfig-checker
+    rev: v3.6.0
+    hooks:
+    -   id: editorconfig-checker

Make sure we are using the latest versions.

$ pre-commit autoupdate
$ git add -u
$ pre-commit install
$ git commit -m 'configure pre-commit'

Run pre-commit on the whole repo.

$ pre-commit run --all-files
check yaml...............................................................Passed
check toml...............................................................Passed
check for added large files..............................................Passed
run editorconfig-checker.................................................Failed
- hook id: editorconfig-checker
- exit code: 1

site/content/devlog/show-your-work.md:
    19: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    23-24: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    37-39: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    41-43: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    45-47: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    50-52: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)

6 errors found
site/content/devlog/create-a-site.md:
    64-66: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)

1 errors found
site/content/devlog/dogfooding-a-theme.md:
    45-47: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    62: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    64: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)
    67: Wrong amount of left-padding spaces(want multiple of 4)

4 errors found

These ones I do not consider errors; maybe this is a bug?

After a bit of digging, it turns out this is expected behavior. But I do not like it, so I will disable it.

Fixing editorconfig-checker for markdown

editorconfig-checker can’t be configured per filetype, but luckily for me, I can sidestep this by having two separate editorconfig-checker hooks with different arguments for different filetypes. One for markdown only, another for all other filetypes.

diff --git a/.pre-commit-config.yaml b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
index 931910f..95b7c80 100644
--- a/.pre-commit-config.yaml
+++ b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
@@ -11,3 +11,11 @@ repos:
     rev: v3.6.0
     hooks:
     -   id: editorconfig-checker
+        name: run editorconfig-checker excluding markdown
+        exclude_types: [markdown]
+    -   id: editorconfig-checker
+        name: run editorconfig-checker for markdown
+        # Disable indent size check for code block
+        # See https://github.com/editorconfig-checker/editorconfig-checker/issues/351
+        args: [-disable-indent-size]
+        types_or: [markdown]

Let’s try it

$ pre-commit run --all-files
check yaml...............................................................Passed
check toml...............................................................Passed
check for added large files..............................................Passed
run editorconfig-checker excluding markdown..............................Passed
run editorconfig-checker for markdown....................................Passed

All green, perfect!

editorconfig-checker does checking only

I purposefully added multiple new lines at the end of site/hugo.toml to see how editorconfig-checker will autoformat it and found out it does not have autoformatting capabilities (and does not consider multiple new lines as an error 🤦‍♂️). Which is a bummer; I specifically chose this hook in the hope of using it instead of prettier for autoformatting, because recent versions of prettier broke integration with pre-commit². I think instead of wasting more time on this sidequest I should stop, but I want to add a couple of helper hooks to remediate basic autoformatting issues.

diff --git a/.pre-commit-config.yaml b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
index 95b7c80..588ef57 100644
--- a/.pre-commit-config.yaml
+++ b/.pre-commit-config.yaml
@@ -4,9 +4,14 @@ repos:
 -   repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
     rev: v6.0.0
     hooks:
+    -   id: trailing-whitespace
+        # Two or more spaces at the end of the line are parsed as hard line break
+        exclude_types: [markdown]
+    -   id: end-of-file-fixer
     -   id: check-yaml
     -   id: check-toml
     -   id: check-added-large-files
+    # TODO: replace with autoformating hook
 -   repo: https://github.com/editorconfig-checker/editorconfig-checker
     rev: v3.6.0
     hooks:

Future considerations

Replace editorconfig-checker with another tool that actually has autoformatting.
Project Idea: I can write an editorconfig-checker replacement with autoformatting based on TreeSitter.
Add a pre-commit workflow for GitHub Actions or use https://pre-commit.ci.

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