> Don't really agree with the leading whitespace alignment either. Alignment across lines is generally troublesome when combined with team development and versi

> Don't really agree with the leading whitespace alignment either. Alignment across lines is generally troublesome when combined with team development and version control: it leads to merge conflicts. I'm definitely with you there. I've written about the disadvantages of this kind of column alignment several times on HN, so won't repeat them here. (Well, if anyone asks, I'll dig up a specific comment or two.) I have a suggestion that can help anyone cure the temptation to column align all the things: Try coding in a proportional font for a while. Contrary to popular wisdom, proportional fonts work fine for most kinds of programming. The only thing you can't do in them is column alignment, and in most cases this limitation is a good thing. Instead of column alignment, you'll be forced to use indentation, and you may discover that indentation alone gives you enough ways to make your code structure clear without arbitrary alignment. In my case, it happened the other way around. I got tired of the problems that column alignment caused, so I stopped using it and switched to indentation only. Some time later I was curious and tried a proportional font, and the code was still just as readable as before. So now I use proportional fonts all the time, and I'm no longer tempted to use column alignment.