jps wrote:I'm personally not a fan of elastic tabstops, primarily because they significantly increase the cost of laying out text: it changes the problem from a local, per-line one, into a global problem: a modification on one line can change how every line in the buffer is rendered.
As oxman said, you only need to look at nearby lines that are similarly tabbed. There's a Java applet at this page that lets you play around with elastic tabstops.
I've actually been thinking about making a Sublime plugin that replicates the behavior of elastic tabstops through capturing the tab key and replacing it with a certain number of spaces, then looking at nearby lines and modifying them. If I find some time I'll throw something together. This use of spaces instead of tabs would also mean that the text would be completely portable into other editors.