Yes, its pretty hacky. I could easily fix this but due to pico-8's limited number of characters, it seems unlikely that anyone would double-space around symbols such as equals. The reason I missed the spacing the first time was because I've got into the habit (not my usual coding habit at all!) of not putting spaces before and after equals. I'll probably give it a bit of an overhaul the next big project I do and try and sort out stuff like this and also make it a bit easier to use. Thanks for identifying the issue though
Viewing post in GEM (Good Enough Minifier) for Pico-8 comments
OK I see, I sometimes put multiple spaces for data alignment (it takes more space but I write the code on the assumption I’ll minify it).
Currently I’m using a custom branch of luamin for my minifications, it’s really good with most normal Lua code. It uses actual parsing which allows it to spot invalid code. But the downside is that it doesn’t recognize the PICO-8 specific patterns like 1-line if() (and some binary operators despite being part of vanilla Lua) so it would error on most code actually written by PICO-8 devs… Requiring me to write fully expanded statements everywhere to avoid errors, then minify them (final result is still good! But I wonder if I couldn’t grasp a few characters here and there with a truly “PICO-8 aware” minifier.