emacs-vdiff VS vim-lion

Not a com user but I’ve been happy with vdiff for diff/merge operations.

You can use ediff in magit by pressing E. Other choice would be https://github.com/justbur/emacs-vdiff. Repo explains how to integrate it to magit.

I heard vdiff is pretty good too https://github.com/justbur/emacs-vdiff

I use vim-lion for this. But generally, I don't like aligning things like this, as it makes the code more effort to write and maintain in any editor that isn't set up exactly how I have mine set up.

Not out of the box, but the are several plugins that can do it, I prefer https://github.com/tommcdo/vim-lion

If you want to rename short_var without having to redo the spaces, you can use R to type over it. Though personally, I avoid writing my code like this and use vim-lion for alignment when I have to. 99% of the time, I use ce or ciw to rename variables.

it's always nice to reference the "state of the art" / competition in the README. It helps the user get a better idea what the software is about. For instance https://github.com/tommcdo/vim-lion

vim-lion

There's also a third option: use a plugin designed for automatically doing whitespace text alignment. Personally, I use vim-lion for this. In your example, you would hit glip= (align text inside the current paragraph by inserting spaces to the left of the first =). The default configuration aligns with the maximum spacing currently used, but you can also configure it to use the minimum spacing necessary to align all the lines.