> To me, this is one of the fundamental problems with column alignment: once you start doing it, it's too easy to start fiddling with all of the possible things

> To me, this is one of the fundamental problems with column alignment: once you start doing it, it's too easy to start fiddling with all of the possible things you might align. And it really doesn't help the reader visualize the code structure except in the simplest cases. I certainly agree that it can cause problems, e.g. with diffs, extraneous decisions, etc. I only tend to do it when there's commonality between the lines (more than trivial ones, like "there's a dot"); e.g. aligning the "=" in a bunch of assignments, aligning the arguments in calls to the same function, etc. > Also, you're in for a maintenance headache when someone changes foo to moreMeaningfulName. Now what? Move everything farther to the right? I tend to follow the following process: - Preserve the existing alignment (e.g. "move everything over") - If any lines grow longer than 80 characters, split them - If any already-split lines shrink to less than 80 characters, remove the split - If you spot a nicer pattern, try it - If there's no pattern anymore, "fall back" to not doing any alignment; consider inserting blank lines if the statements are very different or the lines are very dense I've thought a few times about making an auto-layout script, which would run files through a language-agnostic "nicely aligned" fitness function, and make a bunch of language-specific semantics-preserving edits to try and maximise this score. It's quite low on my TODO list though ;)