Keep tabs as tabs or tabs as spaces
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We use hard tabs at the beginning of code lines and spaces inside the lines. So that if user X use a 2 tabs and looks at code made by Y with 4 tabs the code will only be shifted left (or right if other way around)
Watched code never compiles.
Nothing like a hard tab in the morning. I hate it when people try and use soft tabs. I mean really! Soft tabs? That's like drinking Diet Coke. And we all know that only pussies drink Diet Coke - real men use Hard Tabs. All the time. No exceptions. Pftt, soft tabs....
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
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I used to think like you, but then I had to deal with a file comparison tool that used 8 spaces for tabs and couldn't be changed. Replace tabs with spaces. ALWAYS! 4 backspaces doesn't take that long. Modern IDEs should reduce that to 1 keystroke anyway. I've found I have much less problems across editors and merge utilites and diff programs when I use spaces.
Pete
Man, changing your style to please a tool is bad. Why don't you use a better comparison tool, practically all of them allow you to ignore whitespace differences..?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
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Man, changing your style to please a tool is bad. Why don't you use a better comparison tool, practically all of them allow you to ignore whitespace differences..?
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Well, I think the preference on the team I was on, was spaces when i was arguing for tabs. I won that argument, but then the built-in diff tool with whatever source control I was using at one time used 8 spaces for tabs (maybe that was when IBM took over Rational and screwed up the ClearCase help system) Since I've moved to spaces I haven't regretted it (except when other people haven't used my preferences, but that's a either legacy code or a colleague who hasn't been beaten into submission by me changing tabs to spaces in all code I touch) and I'm fairly sure that if you've got tabs set to space in VS now it will backspace the full tab with one keystroke.
Pete
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
It is the efficient vs. the lazy in this argument. Most people are too lazy to change the flow. VS defaults to spaces so why change it. Watch the people who are in favor of coding with spaces actually code. Watch how slow they (usually) work. I am a tab man. All of my code is used only on Windows. I don't have to deal with using Unix and Windows for the same code base and I can type. Yes it matters. There is nothing worse than having to break away from the keyboard to use the mouse.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
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It is the efficient vs. the lazy in this argument. Most people are too lazy to change the flow. VS defaults to spaces so why change it. Watch the people who are in favor of coding with spaces actually code. Watch how slow they (usually) work. I am a tab man. All of my code is used only on Windows. I don't have to deal with using Unix and Windows for the same code base and I can type. Yes it matters. There is nothing worse than having to break away from the keyboard to use the mouse.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
There is nothing worse than having to break away from the keyboard to use the mouse
I agree it is bad (although "there is nothing worse" is a tad extreme :) ) to use a mouse while coding, but what it has to do with tabs vs spaces?
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Nothing like a hard tab in the morning. I hate it when people try and use soft tabs. I mean really! Soft tabs? That's like drinking Diet Coke. And we all know that only pussies drink Diet Coke - real men use Hard Tabs. All the time. No exceptions. Pftt, soft tabs....
¡El diablo está en mis pantalones! ¡Mire, mire! SELECT * FROM User WHERE Clue > 0 0 rows returned Save an Orange - Use the VCF! Personal 3D projects Just Say No to Web 2 Point Blow
real man don't drink crap.
Watched code never compiles.
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I would agree with you if I could have tabs as tabs that indent and tabs as spaces on the "interior".
"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." - John Quincy Adams
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
I use a ball-peen hammer to indent my code. I carry it everwhere I go. Ever since then, I have had fewer bugs, or at least complaints from the users. Ironically I was looking at this[^] earlier today. To save you the trip, it's about using two spaces or one after a period.
Brad Deja Moo - When you feel like you've heard the same bull before.
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
The Minion and I agreed to a compromise. He prefers spaces, and a tab width of 3. I prefer tabs, and a width of 4. We compromised on spaces and a tab width of 4. Of course, if he doesn't stop using Hungarian notation (in C# no less), they'll find his body floating face down in a culvert somewhere...
Software Zen:
delete this; -
You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
If I prefer a layout with, say, 4 spaces of indent and a co-worker prefers just 2, using spaces means one of us has to suffer. Using Tabs means we can adjust our tabs and see the layout we like (depending on the editor, for sure). VS2010 Pro Power Tools has an option to tell you when you have mixed spaces and tabs, and fix it (into tabs or spaces) for you. So set it up how you want to in VS and let the tools do their job. Of course, if you're not using VS2010 you may have to look at other options - but I believe that the tools we use should provide what we want, and not require us to modify our behavior to suit them.
___________________________________________ .\\axxx (That's an 'M')
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I used to think like you, but then I had to deal with a file comparison tool that used 8 spaces for tabs and couldn't be changed. Replace tabs with spaces. ALWAYS! 4 backspaces doesn't take that long. Modern IDEs should reduce that to 1 keystroke anyway. I've found I have much less problems across editors and merge utilites and diff programs when I use spaces.
Pete
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The Minion and I agreed to a compromise. He prefers spaces, and a tab width of 3. I prefer tabs, and a width of 4. We compromised on spaces and a tab width of 4. Of course, if he doesn't stop using Hungarian notation (in C# no less), they'll find his body floating face down in a culvert somewhere...
Software Zen:
delete this;Wouldn't it been fairer to use tabs, then you could set the tab to be 3 or 4 or whatever number of spaces wide you like!
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
With my favorite code editors, the convention is: If I select multiple lines and hit tab, it indents it all. If I select multiple lines and hit space, it replaces it all with a single space. 'Nuff said. IMHO this point alone makes tabs the natural choice to mass format lines of code. Sure some editors allow you to get around this by having options to convert the tabs into spaces (so you can still tab multiple lines, the editor just immediately converts them to whitespace). But not all editors have this, which means you may end up changing the format of your code depending on which editor you have open (e.g. VS2010 with the tab-to-space conversion enabled versus SQL studio which doesn't have the option AFAIK).
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Wouldn't it been fairer to use tabs, then you could set the tab to be 3 or 4 or whatever number of spaces wide you like!
No, because Visual Studio (at least as recently as VS2008), still does not handle tabs correctly, especially when block indenting a selection.
Software Zen:
delete this; -
You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
At our company and part of our coding standard, no tabs aloud and there is a good reason for it too. Opening files that uses tabs in different editors can create a mess of things. We use 2 space intentation only which limit the backspace to only 2 presses. And then there is always which eliminates the 2 backspaces. Use tab as long as your editor automatically converts tabs to spaces I'll recommend.
"Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence." << please vote!! >>
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
Tabs for indenting, spaces everywhere else! :thumbsup:
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
We recently went through a rewrite of our software standards and the company now mandates spaces over tabs. The reason for this is that every coder has their preferences, tabs, spaces, tabs whatever. We use several different IDEs and compilers with their respective editors for each microprocessor platform we use but we have a common algorithm that we use for our products. What looks aesthetically nice in one editor looks like crap in another. This can make it difficult when the spacing is different or a particular editor does not have the ignore whitespace function when comparing code. Then there’s the version control software and viewers, and so on. Most of the editors allow you to choose between spaces or tabs when using the tab key but will not convert the tabs to spaces when viewing code. So for me it’s not a matter of preference, I have to use spaces, but I have to admit, it is nice when the code indentation matches the rest of the code regardless of what I am using to view the code. And makes the compares easier to go though during V&V :zzz: .
It was broke, so I fixed it.
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It is the efficient vs. the lazy in this argument. Most people are too lazy to change the flow. VS defaults to spaces so why change it. Watch the people who are in favor of coding with spaces actually code. Watch how slow they (usually) work. I am a tab man. All of my code is used only on Windows. I don't have to deal with using Unix and Windows for the same code base and I can type. Yes it matters. There is nothing worse than having to break away from the keyboard to use the mouse.
Need custom software developed? I do custom programming based primarily on MS tools with an emphasis on C# development and consulting. I also do Android Programming as I find it a refreshing break from the MS. "And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs" -- Robert Frost
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
VS defaults to spaces so why change it.
Really? I've always been under the impression that the default in VS is tabs, at least I've always had to go into the options to check the 'replace tabd with spaces' option.
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
It is the efficient vs. the lazy in this argument. Most people are too lazy to change the flow
I think my previous comment debunks this idea.
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Watch the people who are in favor of coding with spaces actually code. Watch how slow they (usually) work
how do you think replacing tabs with spaces actually slows down coding? I just don't get this one.
Ennis Ray Lynch, Jr. wrote:
Yes it matters. There is nothing worse than having to break away from the keyboard to use the mouse.
Again, why would using spaces require us to resort to the mouse more often? The Ctrl key is pretty damn handy for navigating through code.
Pete
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With my favorite code editors, the convention is: If I select multiple lines and hit tab, it indents it all. If I select multiple lines and hit space, it replaces it all with a single space. 'Nuff said. IMHO this point alone makes tabs the natural choice to mass format lines of code. Sure some editors allow you to get around this by having options to convert the tabs into spaces (so you can still tab multiple lines, the editor just immediately converts them to whitespace). But not all editors have this, which means you may end up changing the format of your code depending on which editor you have open (e.g. VS2010 with the tab-to-space conversion enabled versus SQL studio which doesn't have the option AFAIK).
Ben Barreth wrote:
If I select multiple lines and hit tab, it indents it all.
And with 'replace tabs with spaces' this will also work and replace all tabs with spaces, I use it regulary to 'correct' tabs to spaces in editors where I don't trust the 'nicify code' function.
Pete
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You know what I mean - you can have it so that a tab is a tab, and backspace removes it - or you can have it as usually 4 spaces so one tab takes four backspace hits to remove it. I like the first way and despise the second (it offends my need for symmetry), but seem to be alone in this in my current place of work. Or worse yet - "does it matter?" Please reassure me I'm in the right really....
Regards, Rob Philpott.
As a rule at our company we convert all tabs to spaces. This is to stay consistent throughout the code base and it also helps when it comes to merging branches in your source control system.