They're talking about situations where you might want to align text by a number of spaces that isn't divisible by your tab size. I'll expand on their example:

function test(&obj, &obj2, &a) {
$obj->doSomething()
....->doSomethingElse()

$obj2->doSomething()
.....->doSomethingElse()

$a->doSomething()
..->doSomethingElse()
}

Again, dots are "visible spaces" in this example, and being used to align chained methods with the length of the object name.

[–] jadero@programming.dev 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Edit: Bear with me while I sort out the difference between my display and the resulting code block. Ok, close enough.

Ok, thanks. I would instead (and prefer to ) do something like this:

function test(&obj, &obj2, &a) {
$obj---->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()

$obj2--->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()

$a-->--->doSomething()
---->--->doSomethingElse()
}

In this case, the ">" are showing the tab stops and the "-" the resulting white space. Note how all the calls are lined up. (My preferred alignment style, not necessarily anyone else's.)

Yet another edit: I see that I missed addressing alignment on other than tab boundaries. To me, that's just sinful! 😀