In my younger years, I was extremely meticulous about tabulating anything in my code that was remotely tabular, but these days I pay less attention to that. Co

In my younger years, I was extremely meticulous about tabulating anything in my code that was remotely tabular, but these days I pay less attention to that. Constantly re-aligning is a pain, as you mentioned. Another thing I've found is that it forces you to spend brainpower on decisions that are ultimately pointless. For instance, if the code is mostly tabular, but one line has an extra column, what do you do? Stick that column into an existing column? Add another column that will look weird with that one entry hanging? Etc. Another really irritating result of lining everything up just so is that when you do a search+replace on a bunch of code, and change the length of an identifier. Suddenly you've screwed up the formatting on a bunch of tables without even knowing it! This is especially annoying with doing a search+replace across multiple files, with lots of code. That's not to say that lining things up sometimes is a bad thing, particularly when you really have a table (e.g. initializing a big array of structs). Sometimes having things lined up makes it easier to edit later (e.g. using Vim's visual mode). But I'd say that 90% of the time, it's a waste of effort that could be spent, say, making your code actually work better, rather than look better.