[dspillett]

> and when you have that statement between other code

In many circumstances (chunks of SQL in SSIS steps and so forth) there is no code to be around. Within longer tracks of SQL I'll not let "LEFT OUTER JOIN" push the whole statement to the right, but will drop the table name to the next line and maintain the alignment from there on.

> removed the padding you used to align the `=` signs. I dislike big changes where the only thing that changed for a line is the whitespace padding. It obscures the real change

For modifying existing code, I will sometimes let the alignment slide to avoid unnecessary extra lines of change. Though a good visual diff tool will have the option to ignore white-space-only changes and I'm not concerned about patch sizes being a few lines bigger.

To fix the alignment there may be a subsequent check-in that tidies up non-functional elements of the code. I'm happy to have an extra item in history in order to maintain readability over a stream of unaligned text.

Something I've wanted for a long time in code editors is for tabs after the first non-whitespace character on a line to line up, that way such alignment could be managed without extra effort or extra lines in a diff. There would need to be some simple heuristics to control breaking the alignment (and these may need to vary between languages) and perhaps some way to control/override them (a directive in comments?) in edge cases.