Tabs versus Spaces

http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html

by llambda • 14 years ago

5 4 14 years ago

Rust2• 14 years ago

Always, always with the tabs, never spaces.

The main reason is that on my widescreen monitor, indents of 4 characters or less are hard to visually parse in dense areas of code.

If the original author of this code (the actual code I am setting fire to myself over right now) had used tabs instead, then I could set my editor to display indents as 8 or 12 spaces instead, and he can still use 2 spaces if he wants. This is strictly a display issue - he can use 2 and I can use 8, and the file is not different between our two computers.

With spaces, I'm stuck with whatever number of spaces he chose to use for indentation instead of being able to make the code easy to read on my machine.

We're not using 40-column terminals anymore folks. It's all right to uses tabs for indentation.

cskau• 14 years ago

How about simply setting your editor to convert spaces to tabs and save tabs as spaces? Problem fixed right there.

This post is brilliant exactly because it separates holy war from technical issue. Your problem sounds like a technical issue.

reuser• 14 years ago

This excellent solution does assume one is using an editor which supports it, which many people do not (causing endless frustration to them)

Rust2• 14 years ago

That's just throwing complexity (IDE or SCM has to support that functionality) at a problem that doesn't need to be there in the first place (just use tabs instead of spaces).

Even so, I would still need to tell my editor how many spaces to convert to a single tab, and use the same number to convert tabs to spaces when I save or commit. God help us all if someone else forgets to do that too...

Tabs versus Spaces

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