> I long ago concluded that trying to line stuff up in columns like this in code is a mistake. It often results in realignment of blocks for small changes so what should be a small diff in the git history ends up being big.

Seems wrongheaded to me; that's the same reason Elm wanted you to write arrays like this:

    [item1
     ,item2
     ,item3
     ,item4
    ]

instead of a sane way. It means adding or removing an element only changes one line in the diff!

Who cares? It's not hard to understand what's happening in a diff that makes this kind of change. You want the code to be easy to read, not easy to diff.

You could also easily base your diff algorithm on a lexer for the language rather than a lexer for ascii, in which case changing the amount of whitespace would register as "not a change".