padding(0) gives one space of padding about tabwriter HOT 2 CLOSED

I believe this is correct behavior. There are two points here: some weaselly wording in the docs and the presence of minwidth. First, the docs, emphasis mine:

Set the padding between columns. All columns will be separated by at least the number of spaces indicated by padding. If padding is zero, then columns may run up against each other without any separation.

So technically, with that alone, what you're seeing is allowed.

But the other thing here is TabWriter::minwidth, which is set to 2 by default. If you set this to 1 in your example, then the padding between your columns will disappear.

from tabwriter.

Thanks much for the clarification!

from tabwriter.