Text Column Aligner

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.

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.

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.

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.