Comment by layer8

In IDEs that support refactor-renaming (Emacs probably does?), the column-aligned formatting also has the drawback that it breaks (unless the refactoring also auto-realigns all affected code).

For example,

  one      = 1
  fortyTwo = 42
  elite    = 1337

might become:

  one      = 1
  ultimateAnswer = 42
  leet    = 1337

This made me stop column-aligning in most cases. An exception is array initializers for two-dimensional tables with many columns, where the benefit is important enough.