Tabs vs Spaces

[Cpichols]

Plus it's way easier to screw up the number of spaces needed. I guess that IDEs can be set to auto indent with spaces, but if someone else goes in there with notepad, it'll be a mess in a hurry. Using tabs discourages the use of notepad. Is that controlling? Maybe. I am a megalomaniac only in the coding, otherwise I'm very accommodating, so I'm comfortable with that.

[Greg Utas]

That's beyond sloppy. I would reformat it, and anyone who complained would be auditioning for a boys' choir.

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[steve tabler]

I'm regularly asked by other coders to fix code or tweak code that is formattwed like this, or worse. U like my indents to be a consistant 1/4 inch so the long lines of code don't wrap because they have several levels of indent in them. Just give me Allsup (ANSI) format.

[Techsys Admin]

You've got a point there. Word and WordPad (and many others, I'm sure) default to a proportional font so the default tab is 1/2 inch. Oddly, with a monospace fonts, I don't even consider the distance, per se, but instead a sufficient number of characters to make it read comfortably. Perhaps others do this? In any case, I normally choose 4 characters for the tab length in those files but I may have been influenced by so many editors choosing that same number.

[Mark Starr]

Indent? That’s really a thing? I just left-align everything. Tried right-align, but that was messy. :)

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[User 11566074]

I use spaces (inserted using the Tab key) according to the language: Python - 4 as is the usual setting, HTML/JavaScript: 2 because otherwise indenting of HTML tends to become too high to be comfortable.

[Cpichols]

Yes, I tried that in the first few weeks of my job and got in major trouble because git was a Christmas tree. And they just ignored my branches because of it. Low man on totem pole.

[obermd]

I think it had to do with what a mechanical typewriter was able to reliably insert. Remember, the tab key didn't shift x spaces, it shifted to the next tab stop, and yes, these were physical stops in a mechanical typewriter. Since these old machines worked on a fixed width font of 8 characters per inch and the physical tab stops were one inch apart, a tab became associated with 8 characters.

[megaadam]

I fine with that as long as you pick up the tab!

"If we don't change direction, we'll end up where we're going"

[Mike Hankey]

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[TNCaver]

Tabs. Converting the tabs to spaces in my code is a capital offense with immediate execution of the sentence.

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[Mike Hankey]

Awesome thanks for the link. Good storage alternative, especially since the organizers are so dang expensive.

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[Member_15777962]

I use Tabs for Columns, and spaces for strings, Carriage Return/Line Feed for new Row. Makes sense when Using Excel. For notepad it doesn't matter :-)

[Jim Spencer100]

If(spaceToAdd > 1) { Tab(); } else { Space(); } // This is how my brain does it :P

[englebart]

I prefer tabs. Our code size in bytes could double or quadruple or ? based on how many spaces were substituted. A lot of lines in brace delimited languages are 8 tabs, open or close brace. Python, stick to spaces!

[StatementTerminator]

I use tab and shift+tab in VS to keep things in neat code blocks. I don't really care how many spaces a tab is as long as it's consistent (I use the default). I've never seen a good reason to use spaces, whenever I see code like that it's usually a mess. It's possible to format code well using spaces, but that's not what I usually see in the wild.

[Juan Pablo Reyes Altamirano]

If it doesn't auto-indent, I will tab. But now I wonder if K&R C had anything to say about that :~

[James Curran]

I use Tabs (as the Good Lord Intended)

Truth, James

[Gary R Wheeler]

I used tabs until Visual Studio .NET 2003 unrecoverably broke the block indent/undent operation when you mixed tabs and spaces. After that I switched to spaces. And yes, this same operation has been broken ever since. VC6 would let you have {tab}{tab}{sp}{sp}stuff, and when you indented, that became {tab}{tab}{tab}{sp}{sp}stuff. All versions since then have stripped the leading tabs and/or spaces and inserted N tabs or N*s spaces. Studio has been through more than one editor rewrite since then, and it still doesn't work right. I'm using VS2019 now, and it occasionally decides to treat indents as blocks. It's not predictable though.

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