> you could have your editor insert the trailing space automatically (perhaps with exceptions for cases like function(<tab>arguments)), then manually delete the

> you could have your editor insert the trailing space automatically (perhaps with exceptions for cases like function(<tab>arguments)), then manually delete the space in the cases where you don't want whitespace between table columns That's just as bad, manual fiddling is precisely what autoformatting algorithms are supposed to solve. Especially in the more painful cases of tables. Also, inserting many spaces in large tables is a rather costly operation, I have to use debouncing in the current elastic tabstops plugins that align with spaces to avoid that cost on every keypress. Also, you're asking to differentiate between the two invisibles (tabs and spaces), that would require making one of them visible, but then in many cases that visibility would be legal and thus just visual noise > you could very reasonably have a single escape sequence that sets a minimum padding for all the columns present on the current line; You can't do that since in many languages these sequences would be invalid input > my concern is to make the format able to express general layouts, not to make it maximally compressed Yet your format can't do that without a lot of manual fiddling > manually adjusting tabstops is only an adequate replacement for a general string representation for nested tabular text layouts in a few niche special cases like a single developer looking at their own code This also works in such niche special case as non-code editing