vim-lion VS lispy

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.

Some killer features in Emacs, which I would recommend checking out, is imenu and movement by s-expression (functions like forward-sexp). These are built into Emacs and make navigating across or inside blocks of code very easy. I have also seen that lispy, which is usually used for Lisp code also supports Python. Again I can't speak to any specifics about how well these things work for Python devs.

While writing other programming languages with LSP, it formats the buffer once I hit save. Is there any way to make https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy do some equivalent behaviour?

Without any order magit, lispy and minions.

I don't know cider, but...I found lispy mode a revelation in making the easy, easier.

The level of interactivity in your emacs determines how easy trying emacs-lisp becomes. I suggest checking out https://github.com/abo-abo/lispy, it makes it easy to look up documentation (C-c 1 I believe) and evaluate S-expressions on the fly (keybinding is e). Also C-h f, C-h k, C-h v are always very helpful. Also check out helpful (the package), selectrum, marginalia, prescient, etc.

Emacs seems to attract quite a lot of people who want structural code editing. We now have * paredit * smartparens * evil-cleverparens * lispy * symex * combobulate (more?)

Obviously, we have packages like Paredit and Lispy, recently we got SymEx, but these are all for the Lisp family of languages, where syntactic redundancy is very high because of the homoiconicity.