> However at a minimum formatting changes shouldn’t regularly complicate doing a diff.
If the code needs to be reformatted, this should be done in a separate commit. Fortunately, there are now structural/semantic diff tools available for some languages that can help if someone hasn't properly split their formatting and logic changes.
Reformatting comitts still leaves the issue that you deprive yourself of any possibility to reliably diff across such commits (what changes from there to there?) Or attribute a line of code to a specific change (why did we introduce this code?).
What we should have instead is syntax-aware diffs that can ignore meaningless changes like curly braces moving into another line or lines getting wrapped for reasons.
> What we should have instead is syntax-aware diffs that can ignore meaningless changes like curly braces moving into another line or lines getting wrapped for reasons.
These diffs already exist (at least for some languages) but aren't yet integrated into the standard tools. For example, if you want a command line tool, you can use https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic or if you are interested in a VS Code extension / GitHub App instead, you can give https://semanticdiff.com a try.
If the code needs to be reformatted, this should be done in a separate commit. Fortunately, there are now structural/semantic diff tools available for some languages that can help if someone hasn't properly split their formatting and logic changes.