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Elastic tabstops: A better way to indent and align code
(nickgravgaard.com)
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In some of my personal code I liked to have used it (in very specific circumstances, like having many similar-sized parameter declarations e.g. protobuf), but as you said the lack of support means that a lot of code formatters simply trim unnecessary spaces so they never stick around.
What's more, I am still yet to find a consistent rule about when to apply this kind of formatting - the example in the article shows one for method args but it just doesn't look good at all. Key-value lists (like maps) might be a good place to use it, but if one key ends up being very long you have a ton of unnecessary space, so I would need to "group" together similar-length keys to make it aesthetically pleasing: