Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

But the spaces around | make it easier to read, than, say, CSV.

fao_ 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Honestly it continually surprises me how people forget about TSV

It's the perfect format, more or less! CSV, but no difficulty around commas, and the only major risk being an editor that converts tabs to spaces

	▲	hmry 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I agree it's great, but that risk is so major that I stopped using it. "There's a 50% chance that your editor will invisibly corrupt the data you enter, and another 30% chance to corrupt the entire file" is just not usable... Especially in Zed where the only way to switch hard tabs is buried in the settings menu, and impossible to change per buffer.

echelon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Yeah, because it’s a PITA to align everything by hand.

For now. I get the feeling we'll have tooling everywhere that does this soon.

I was recently tab-completing a Markdown table and whatever autocomplete model I had just fixed the table up without any intervention.

	▲	notpushkin 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it’s not terribly hard to do that even without AI (Prettier can do it, for example). But there’s a lot of places where the tooling just isn’t available. Then again, it’s probably not a big deal if your GitHub comment markup isn’t perfect. I think the root of the problem is, almost everything else you use in Markdown is easy to do by hand. There’s just no good syntax for tables like this, I guess.