OK so I want to start out by saying I understand the philosophy behind error-prone and it not wanting to replace the usage of a tool like a code formatter.

That said, there are some minor issues that a code formatter can't solve.

Lets say I had some code like the following and we found an unused variable, as an example bug checker:

public class Person {
  private String favoritePhrase = "Hello World!";
  private int favoriteFlavor = "Strawberry"; // unused
  private int favoriteNumber = 45;

  private double height = 4.5;
  private double weight = 100;
  ...
}

OK so error prone analyzes my code and gives me something like the following output:

public class Person {
  private String favoritePhrase = "Hello World!";
  
  private int favoriteNumber = 45;

  private double height = 4.5;
  private double weight = 100;
  ...
}

But now the code has lost its organization. favorite related fields now have an extra line break between them, and a code formatter can't detect this to clean it up.

I would love for this to be a configurable option for error prone, to allow for cleanup of that extra whitespace, but please let me know if this is something out of scope for error-prone to do.

Happy to submit a PR myself, but I will need to check with y'all first if my corporate Google CLA is good for error-prone, since it wasn't specifically signed for error-prone.