I do find properly aligned code easier to read in general, I'm not willing to give that up.

The crux of the issue is poor tooling. Aligning correctly is a pain because most editors suck terribly at it. For instance neither emacs nor vim align correctly when using tabs by default (they use as many tabs as they can and then pad using spaces, instead of indenting only with tabs and aligning only with spaces). If they did it would be painless to indent and re-indent.

When some of the most venerable code editors out there can't even seem to get it right I think there's no point in fighting it. Learn to stop worrying and love the space, I know I did. Or alternatively use a language like go which provides a standard tool to indent everything, make it mandatory pre-commit and never look back.

Yeah; the correct answer to a good codestyle is good tooling; high quality automated tooling. Things like gofmt and prettier are excellent. yapf and clang-format are also pretty good, but need a lot of set up.

But I never found a single editor that handles spaces correctly. I currently use vscode with vim bindings and whenever I deal with a space-indented codebase I want to tear my hair out: I inconsistently have to hit backspace sometimes once, sometimes multiple times to get rid of an indent level in insert mode. And don't get me started with yaml, a really painful experience to edit it.

Can't vscode automatically remove an entire indentation level with a single backspace? Many editors can do that, maybe with a non-default setting, but regardless.

> Tabs for indentation; spaces for alignment

On a large code base with multiple committers, I've never seen this rule followed consistently. In fact, I think this shows a poor engineering decision: "Let's make a rule where everything looks OK 95% of the time, except when you change tab widths (which is, presumably, why we made the rule in the first place.)"

I often run into trouble with IDEs that think they are smart, but aren't. "I see you have a space following a tab, so I will replace all your spaces with a tab, whenever you save the file"

Well everything looks OK 100% of the time if everyone followed the rule. Sadly, human history tells us that's an invalid assumption to make.

Forcing people to remember relatively minor things is a poor use of headspace. Enforce a code formatter/linter, make the test suite success dependent on it, and never argue again.

The alignment in that link is laughable. Please use newlines and an extra indentation level.

I believe older versions of Xcode did that by default with objc (maybe still; didn't check lately) if you press enter in the middle of a function argument list. Really annoying.

> Tabs for indentation; spaces for alignment;

If you try this, it fails for people who use a different tab size than you, which is the whole supposed point of using tabs.

But yes, the correct answer is don't align. Utter waste of time.

> If you try this, it fails

If it fails, then you have not understood and you are not using your tools correctly. If your alignment depends on tab width, then you are not using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, you are using tabs for indentation and alignment and spaces for alignment, which of course breaks when you change your tab width.

Ah, I see what you mean. I've never seen an editor work this way, normally they just swap spaces with tabs, leaving however many spaces can't be swapped. Which is probably why I've never seen tabbed code in the real world that doesn't look like utter garbage.

This was definitely a problem back in the day, but I think most popular editors do the right thing now. And like you say, alignment is usually a waste of time anyways.

This entire thread is why I love gofmt so much. I haven't thought about this useless bullshit for years.

Myself, working on an old open source project, I just don't care. Match the nearby style best you can, use your own style on new code, who cares, get on with your work.

I don't see how that code is unreadable, but for me it isn't representative of how I would align that block anyway.