There's an even more conservative setting, which is "don't use alignment at all, use indentation only." If you do that, all of these issues go away. You can us

There's an even more conservative setting, which is "don't use alignment at all, use indentation only." If you do that, all of these issues go away. You can use tabs or spaces for indentation, and it won't affect your formatting. You can reformat the code to a different number of spaces, or switch from spaces to tabs or vice versa, and your code will still be perfectly formatted. A good way to learn and practice this style is to switch your editor to a proportional font. Now you won't be able to use column alignment, and without even working at it you'll naturally start to explore an alignment-free style. I've had many programmers react in shock when they see I write code in a proportional font, but when you don't use alignment it stops mattering what font you use.