For me it's not about lining things up in columns as much as it is about column widths. So, for example, hitting up or down, I know which character the cursor i

For me it's not about lining things up in columns as much as it is about column widths. So, for example, hitting up or down, I know which character the cursor is going to go to (which means I can string keypresses together and do them in a fluid movement). Putting in a hard limit for line lengths (which is very important to me, I know opinions on this differ) means that limit can be drawn as a literal line on the UI (which in turn means I know how small I can resize the editor pane to be). Similar lines with slightly different values (e.g. 'x', 'y' and 'z') will line up so the different values are underneath each other everywhere they appear in the line (also those lines will be the same length which reassures me those lines are the same outside the variables/values).