Guiding principles and rationale
When deciding on style guidelines, the style team follows these guiding principles (in rough priority order):
- 
readability - scan-ability
- avoiding misleading formatting
- accessibility - readable and editable by users using the widest variety of hardware, including non-visual accessibility interfaces
- readability of code in contexts without syntax highlighting or IDE assistance, such as rustc error messages, diffs, grep, and other plain-text contexts
 
- 
aesthetics - sense of 'beauty'
- consistent with other languages/tools
 
- 
specifics - compatibility with version control practices - preserving diffs, merge-friendliness, etc.
- preventing rightward drift
- minimising vertical space
 
- 
application - ease of manual application
- ease of implementation (in rustfmt, and in other tools/editors/code generators)
- internal consistency
- simplicity of formatting rules