That’s why it’s also a big accessibility feature. With big font sizes, four spaces are distracting but you can configure tabs to show up as one character, which is way more reasonable with font sizes larger than usual
I had a colleague that is legally blind in my second real job. The dude is brilliant (and hilarious) but these things would significantly enable or screw up his productivity. I have always felt fortunate to have had direct butt in seat exposure to the importance of accessibility at such a young age.
That’s one of the benefits of using tabs. Some people might like 4 spaces for indentation, whereas others like 2 spaces. If you use tabs, you can configure your editor to use whatever tab size you want, and they’re just stored as tab characters in the file.
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment (eg for ASCII art).
Sorry, my phrasing was sloppy. Most popular IDEs and editors do not have a plug-in or setting that implements elastic tabstops correctly. In particular, there’s no implementation for vim, emacs, VSCode, eclipse, or any JetBrains IDEs. (I had forgotten that there’s one for Visual Studio and one for Notepad++.)
I just remembered the dumbest argument I’ve ever suffered about this - someone insisting the “length” of one tab changed, depending on what’s before it. As in, is it eight spaces, or seven? Or six! It only goes up to eight spaces! No. It goes one stop. The same way a newline goes one line, and cannot by measured by how many times you’d slap the spacebar to get text to wrap around to the next line.
They mean if you insert a tab after some other text.
Word processors and desktop publishing apps tend to have tab stops (sometimes visible in a ruler at the top of the page) and pressing tab goes to the next tab stop. They’re about an inch apart (assuming letter or A4 paper) by default, and you can usually also add your own tab stops. For example, you might have text like this:
I actually does code a bit in phone(and only codes in phone) and still preffer tabs. Hate it when some editors auto spaceify it. Also you can have tabs on keyboard by installing abother keyboard app
But this is just one more example of our superiority - a perfect compromise between the file size and the nightmare that is two different invisible characters
After years of ass-whopping by python interpreter for stray tab characters, I’m now mentally rejecting the existence of tab character in my computing devices.
Tabs are objectively the better choice as it allows each dev individually to decide tab width in their editors. Spaces in contrast don’t allow this same flexibility as they are used for much more than simply indentation, for example you likely put a space after each argument or operator IE func(arg1, arg2) or 1 + 2.
Code can be viewed in more than just an editor. It might be in a terminal, rendered in a browser, etc. Sometimes you might even have to view it in an environment you don’t control. I am very disinterested in configuring each and every tool to have sensible tabstops, if such a tool can even be configured.
Then don’t? The whole reason nearly all the spaces guys do 4 spaces is cause that’s the nearly universal tab width. You won’t like this but the same exact argument can be made for spaces yet I’d bet you haven’t even once configured the width of those.
I don’t actually change tab width, it’s the default 4 spaces equivalent for me but just because I don’t take advantage of the ability doesn’t mean I should prevent others from doing so.
This is simply false, many systems have them configured by default to 8, particularly most CLI tools. Git, for example, is 8, and btw, changing it is not readily done and requires you to hack around it by using a custom pager command. In fact, all core gnu utils (and even bash itself) default to 8, as well vim, emacs, nano, gedit, etc.
I use 2 spaces since I work in Haskell, which is a significant whitespace language where you want certain syntactic constructs to exist at a different level of indentation from your main code block. So yes, I have configured it. 2 spaces is also exceedingly common for HTML (browser Dev tools renders HTML with 2 spaces, even).
There is not a universal indentation width, though it is almost always universal within a particular language or perhaps project, in which case it’s much better to have everything standardized. Code formatters enforced on a project are the norm, and those are way more impactful on how the code is read. But they are valuable because consistency is valuable. And yet, somehow you don’t have huge scores of developers complaining about being forced to format their code in a way they don’t like.
As I said, you don’t necessarily control the environment in which you are viewing code. A common example is reading code over a shared screen. So you can easily end up reading code in a way you don’t like anyway, so it may as well be some reasonable (if not preferable) standard that everyone is using.
Looking at code on somebody else’s screen is entirely missing the point of using tabs over spaces. The entire point is that mine looks like how I want and theirs looks like how they want even though the file is identical. We can each have wildly different tab width yet it’ll look wildly different to each of us when we program. That’s again the point.
Code formatters are great! I love them. Using tabs over spaces is objectively a better formatting option. One of my favorite features in code formatters is that they’ll swap out spaces to tabs for you insane people who insist on mashing the space bar to indent.
No, it’s not missing the point. The premise that you’re always looking at code on the same screen is false, and you don’t always have control over how all screens are configured.
Umm, you do realize no one manually enters all of the spaces, right? Basically all editors support an expandtab feature which inserts the amount of spaces you want whenever you hit the tab key.
Code formatters behave exactly the same regardless if you’re using tabs or spaces, so not sure what you’re talking about.
I did not miss the point. I fully understand that’s why people want tabs. I just think it’s a pretty stupid and petty reason to make for a worse experience when viewing code in places you don’t control. I still don’t know why using spaces is an issue when we enforce standards in literally every other facet of contributing to a codebase. We enforce coding styles. Indentation is part of the coding style.
What’s yaml have to do with anything? It’s like python with syntactic whitespace which is unrelated to this discussion. The Tab vs Space debate is entirely around non syntactic whitespace which doesn’t effect how the code is parsed. And yes Python technically does both tabs and spaces but it’s all sorts of fucky.
Terminal editors while still used a ton aren’t really what I was referring to. Newer terminal editors such as Helix have tab width configured per language most of which default to a width of 4 spaces but toml/yaml both default to 2 spaces. I was mainly referring to GUI editors as frankly that’s just what most people use nowadays. JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, Eclipse, VS Code, Notepad++ were primarily what I was thinking of as I’ve used all of them and they all default to a tab width of 4 hence why I said nearly universal. Also I said nearly terminal editors being the only editors I’ve used that don’t default to a width of 4 seems like a fair usage of the term.
Sometimes. I love auto formatting, I spam the shit out of it more than I spam save but it’s definitely not perfect. It gets real confused with inconsistent indention like that. Especially with Python it’ll fuckup
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