multilign.el is a tiny minor mode for displaying multiline string literals with padded indents, correctly aligning continuation lines to the first line of text (per the string’s output).

Bumping them past the level of surrounding code forms helps preserve the logical relationship between expression nesting and indentation, reducing visual noise from getting in the way of reading Lisp code.

It is implemented entirely as a display property, using font-lock-mode to update visible portions of the buffer, and does not make any modifications to the underlying text.

Configuration:

Clone this repo with Elpaca / straight.el, or just copy the 100 or so lines of code to your config file.

Add to any major-mode hook:

(add-hook 'emacs-lisp-mode-hook #'multilign-mode) ;; recommended

Disclaimer:

This is a fairly new package, mainly tested so far on lisp-y modes and on Emacs 29.1 where it caused a number of crashes during development due to jit-lock freezing up the UI in a loop. I’ve added some guards against this happening, but bug reports are welcome 🐛