align-columns

name	align-columns
description	Use when pretty-printing tab-delimited output with left, center, right, or decimal-aware numeric alignment in EDirect text workflows.
disable-model-invocation	true
user-invocable	true

align-columns

Quick Start

• Command: printf 'a\t1.2\nlonger\t10.35\n' | PATH=/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin:$PATH /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/align-columns -a ln
• Local executable: /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/align-columns
• Full reference: See references/help.md for complete options

When To Use This Tool

• Make tab-delimited tables easier to read in the terminal or in generated reports.
• Align numeric columns on decimal points while leaving text columns left- or right-justified.
• Inspect width requirements or add extra spacing before sharing intermediate outputs with humans.

Common Patterns

# 1) Left-align text and decimal-align numbers
printf 'a\t1.2\nlonger\t10.35\n' | \
  PATH=/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin:$PATH \
  /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/align-columns -a ln

# 2) Use the built-in default layout shortcut
printf 'col1\tcol2\nx\ty\n' | \
  PATH=/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin:$PATH \
  /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/align-columns -

# 3) Print only computed widths
printf 'a\t1.2\nlonger\t10.35\n' | \
  PATH=/home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin:$PATH \
  /home/vimalinx/miniforge3/envs/bio/bin/align-columns -a w

Recommended Workflow

1. Start from tab-delimited input with a consistent column count.
2. Choose an alignment string with -a, remembering that the last letter repeats for remaining columns.
3. Tune indentation and spacing with -h and -g only after the basic alignment mode looks right.
4. Use the aligned output for human inspection, not as the canonical machine-readable representation.

Guardrails

• This wrapper relies on transmute; calling the absolute path without the bio / EDirect bin directory on PATH can fail with transmute: command not found.
• -help, --help, and help work, but -version is noisy in this environment because it delegates to einfo -version, which prints an error banner instead of a clean version string.
• The script expects tab-delimited input, despite many autogenerated summaries calling it a general whitespace aligner.
• Alignment letters are applied column-wise, with the last specified letter repeated for any remaining columns.