Since I've been using whitespace.el, I've noticed that most of the rectangle functions are very intrusive: they put whitespaces in unexpected places. The reasons are: 1/ move-to-column doesn't make any difference between converting a tab into space and adding spaces at the end of a line. This is now fixed. 2/ operate-on-rectangle does too much blind work, notably messing with the end of the line even for functions like string-rectangle which shouldn't be concerned. So I've rewritten rect.el to correct these problems. The rectangle functions now avoid inserting spaces in unwanted places, unless a prefix is given for some of them, in which case the old behavior is (sort of) used. Here are examples of the differences, if anybody wants to comment the changes I propose. There's notably something on which I'm not completely decided yet: for the functions with a prefix, we could push even farther the choice: - don't add unnecessary blanks at all (no prefix) - add blanks on non empty lines only - add blanks blindly (current prefix meaning)