Tables can be very nice to work with in a text editor with some convenience features like automatic alignment and tab-to-next-cell. At least that's my experienc

Tables can be very nice to work with in a text editor with some convenience features like automatic alignment and tab-to-next-cell. At least that's my experience using tables in emacs with org-mode files. But I imagine there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes to make that work, plus there's some inflexible syntax used to recognize when your cursor is in a table. But I like your approach of leveraging monospace fonts to work as informal tables.