I also prefer proportional fonts, but some people's "ASCII artsy" programming styles, along with editors themselves, make it hard to use readable fonts in pract

I also prefer proportional fonts, but some people's "ASCII artsy" programming styles, along with editors themselves, make it hard to use readable fonts in practice. What I would like is a language-aware editor that can visually align assignments, parameters, etc. without touching the actual whitespace characters. You get 1 tab for indentation (if the language allows tabs) and 1 space for alignment, and the editor takes care of the rest. The raw text would still be readable enough and use fewer bytes for people who prefer to code in a monospace terminal over SSH over an acoustic coupler from a phone booth in rural Texas.