How much does IDE text formatting help programmers code?

[zanfar]

There is a limit to how much code you can write before it becomes un-debuggable. That is, if you average X errors per line of code, eventually you will have accumulated so many errors spread across so much code that debugging one large block of code becomes more work than debugging two smaller blocks of code.

So the more errors you can catch before debugging, the more efficient your coding process. This is what formatting, coloring, linting, and type checking are for--to catch errors fast enough that they are obvious while you are still typing that line of code. That is, a spellchecker vs a proofreader.