In theory we could have an IDE apply a reformatting to any piece of code we looked at and formatted any changes back to the standard for the code base on updates. One of the things I dislike is that sometimes autoformatting does a poor job and looses some information that manually formatting provides but honestly in go fmt is mostly fine it just works.

All of this seems doable, I just think for the most part we don't care very much about our preferences, it has very little impact on readability. Its definitely doable however we could view the code however we most wanted it and have it stored in a different formatting. Might not be 100% round trip stable but it probably doesn't matter.

There is always better where the defaults can be overridden and formatting forced and we only format new and changed lines to reduce potential instability but again go fmt doesn't really suffer from this so its possible to make things pretty reliable. Its simple really, there is a default formatting and the code is stored that way and we can then have our view of choice reformat the code as we want it, when its stored its stored in the default.