> It's a coding style that lies and it should be taken out back.
I’m a fan of only aligning things that are actually similar. The important part IMO is to make it easy to see differences in the middle of something that’s a pattern, not to extract similarity out of semantically different things (which is the reason I don’t love aligning the opening function braces). I’m also a fan of using the -w flag with git diff, and of avoiding hyperbole, but there is a valid and very good point in there about causing merge conflicts! ;) I don’t get to use my grid aligner all that often, because using clang-format is more important, so I don’t use it around other people very much. But all that said, I never hesitate to re-grid something if a variable changes, as long as I know it won’t cause a source control conflict.
* edit BTW I just realized the better argument which is that clang-format already has the very problem you mentioned: renaming anything can and will often cause reflow of text. Avoiding grid-alignment of text has very little bearing on whether this is going to happen to you. The only way to avoid formatting changes in your source control is to never reformat code, which isn’t something my team wants to prioritize, so we make do with selective application of clang-format. It’s sometimes useful to separate code changes from whitespace/format updates.
I’m a fan of only aligning things that are actually similar. The important part IMO is to make it easy to see differences in the middle of something that’s a pattern, not to extract similarity out of semantically different things (which is the reason I don’t love aligning the opening function braces). I’m also a fan of using the -w flag with git diff, and of avoiding hyperbole, but there is a valid and very good point in there about causing merge conflicts! ;) I don’t get to use my grid aligner all that often, because using clang-format is more important, so I don’t use it around other people very much. But all that said, I never hesitate to re-grid something if a variable changes, as long as I know it won’t cause a source control conflict.
* edit BTW I just realized the better argument which is that clang-format already has the very problem you mentioned: renaming anything can and will often cause reflow of text. Avoiding grid-alignment of text has very little bearing on whether this is going to happen to you. The only way to avoid formatting changes in your source control is to never reformat code, which isn’t something my team wants to prioritize, so we make do with selective application of clang-format. It’s sometimes useful to separate code changes from whitespace/format updates.