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Text Column Aligner

DeveloperText

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INPUT

Auto Process

OUTPUT

Client Side

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Guide

Text Column Aligner

The Text Column Aligner pads spaces between text so a chosen delimiter — an equals sign, colon, comment marker, arrow, pipe, tab, or any custom string — lines up vertically across every row. It turns ragged key/value blocks, config snippets, and inline comments into clean visual columns without rewriting the content itself, so the structure of the data becomes scannable at a glance.

How to Use

Paste your multi-line text into the Input Text box.
Pick the character or string to align on under Align By (or choose Custom… to type your own delimiter).
Adjust the options — preserve indentation, strip trailing whitespace, or change how many spaces sit before and after the delimiter.
Read the aligned result from the Aligned Text output and copy or download it with one click.

Features

Eleven built-in delimiters – Align on =, :, //, =>, ->, |, comma, semicolon, tab, first space, or any custom string.
Align every occurrence – Optionally line up the second, third, and later delimiters on the same line, not just the first.
Preserve leading indentation – Keep existing indent levels for nested config and code blocks.
Configurable spacing – Set 0–10 spaces before and after the delimiter to match your house style.
Strip trailing whitespace – Remove the padding that often shows up in version-control diffs.
Live preview – Output updates as you type, no submit button needed.
Client-side – Text never leaves your browser; works offline once the page is loaded.

 FAQ

Why do code formatters align variable assignments by the equals sign?

Visual alignment turns a column of names and values into a table the eye can scan top-to-bottom in one pass. Without alignment the reader has to re-find the delimiter on every line, which is roughly the same eye-tracking cost as reading prose. Once the equals signs line up, mismatched indentation, missing entries, or one outlier value jump out immediately — that's why gofmt's struct field alignment, Sublime's Align package, and editor plugins like vim-align exist.
What is monospace alignment and why does it only work in monospace fonts?

Monospace fonts give every glyph the same advance width, so padding with N space characters always shifts the next character by exactly N glyph widths. In a proportional font the letter 'i' is much narrower than 'W', so adding spaces to make character positions match would not make pixel positions match. That's why aligned code only looks aligned in fonts like Consolas, Menlo, JetBrains Mono, or Courier — switch to Arial and the columns collapse.
What is the difference between aligning by a delimiter and reformatting with a tool like gofmt or Prettier?

Delimiter alignment is a pure-text transform that only adds or removes spaces around a chosen character — it does not understand the underlying syntax. gofmt, rustfmt, and Prettier parse the source into an AST and re-emit it according to language rules, which means they can split lines, reorder imports, and choose where alignment is or is not idiomatic. Delimiter alignment is therefore safer for plain text, config snippets, and ad-hoc tables, while AST-based formatters are required for production source code.
When does column alignment hurt readability rather than help it?

Aligned columns add visible churn to version control: changing one line's identifier length forces a re-pad across the whole block, so a one-character rename becomes a multi-line diff. This is the main reason the Go authors removed the column-alignment behaviour from some idioms, and why Prettier deliberately does not align. Alignment also breaks down for long-tail outliers — one very long key forces every other line to grow a wide gap, which is harder to read than a single space.