[In]sane Default Formatting

For some inane reason, nearly every editor and formatter out there defaults to 4-space indents. Which is fine if you're a psychopath, I suppose? I mean look at the difference between the same snippet with 4 spaces and 2 spaces.

for stream in listener.incoming() {
    let mut newconn: MyConn;

    match stream {
	Ok(s) => {
	    newconn = MyConn{
		stream: s,
		name: String::new()
	    };
	},

	Err(ref e)
	    if e.kind() == ErrorKind::WouldBlock
		=> {break;},

	Err(e) => panic!("conn err: {e}"),
    }

for stream in listener.incoming() {
  let mut newconn: MyConn;

  match stream {
    Ok(s) => {
      newconn = MyConn{
	stream: s,
	name: String::new()
      };
    },

    Err(ref e)
      if e.kind() == ErrorKind::WouldBlock
	=> {break;},

    Err(e) => panic!("conn err: {e}"),
  }

Night and day.

I guess it's fine if the tab width is defaulted to four spaces and I could override it to the obviously better option of two spaces without putting my leg behind my neck, but of course not. Case in point, this is the snippet of my Emacs configuration required just to make Verilog indentation default to 2 spaces.

(use-package verilog-ts-mode
  :defer t
  :custom
  (verilog-case-indent 2)
  (verilog-cexp-indent 2)
  (verilog-indent-level 2)
  (verilog-indent-level-module 2)
  (verilog-indent-level-directive 2)
  (verilog-indent-level-declaration 2)
  (verilog-ts-indent-level 2))

Sorry about the lack of syntax highlighting in the above snippets. Website is still getting sorted out/setup, I'll try to get something sorted.

Regardless. Either editors and tooling need to default to the superior standard of 2 space indents or they need to make my life easier when changing it to 2 spaces. However, I doubt either of those will happen before the heat death of the universe.

Note: After discussion with a friend (and some casual scripting last weekend) it comes to mind that Python would look utterly horrid with a 2-space indent structure. I do still think that the general viewpoint of this post is accurate, albeit with the caveat that it only holds for sane languages that utilize some sort of delimiter to indicate discrete semantic sections. Python using whitespace to describe code structure has always left an odd impression on me, and it's hard to generalize the formatting recommendations made here to it as such.