Spent a frustrating weekend working on / learning facebook applications, and mucking around with jquery selectors for another project... So I blew some steam off and wrote a vim script using the python bindings to vertically align selected text, which let's me turn junk like:

dictionary = {
	one_dang_thing : 1,
	two_umms : 'tweeee',
	apricot : 'fish',
}

dictionary = {
	one_dang_thing : 1,       
	two_umms       : 'tweeee',
	apricot        : 'fish',  
}

python << EOF
import vim, re
def align(start, end):
	indent = ""
	indent_re = re.compile(r'^(\s*)')
	for m in indent_re.finditer( vim.current.buffer[start] ):
		indent = m.group(1)

	columns = [ ]
	for line in vim.current.buffer[start-1:end]:
		for i, word in enumerate(line.split()):
			if i >= len(columns):
				columns.append( 0 )
			if len(word) > columns[i]:
				columns[i] = len(word)
	for index in range(start-1,end):
		words = []
		for i, word in enumerate(vim.current.buffer[index].split()):
			words.append ( word + " " * ( columns[i] - len(word) ) )
		vim.current.buffer[index] = indent + " ".join(words)
		
EOF
command! -nargs=0 -range Align :py align(<line1>, <line2>)

I still haven't figured out why I don't like using user-generated vim plugins. ;)