Microsoft veteran ditches Team Tabs, blaming storage trauma of yesteryear

> It's the fault of a coder

It's the fault of the language. Spacing is used to split blocks of code, or is it?

Re: Is it a really a problem?

Five is right out.

Tabs all the way... just standardise how many spaces = 1 tab, it's really not difficult and that's the cause of 99% of problems.

Personally, I hate any editor that distinguishes and compilers shouldn't care one bit. The nonsense with Makefiles and other indentation-dependent languages is so ridiculous that it's laughable it still survives in the modern age.

Hell, if you must, insist that pressing Tab literally inserts 4 spaces into the document.... I'm happy with that as a compromise.

But don't say I *can't* use a Tab key and *must* type in 4 individual spaces for every indent level in a large codebase.

> tab tab tab

Is indeed quicker, which is why any text editor that is worth the CPU/Memory/... to run will automatically insert the correct number of spaces (including less than four if there is already a character or more in place. And auto-indent the next line to match (use shift-tab to reduce indent). A serious editor (eg. what you should be using if paid to write code) will support an editorconfig file in the repo so the team shares settings and does not depend on everyone configuring their editors the same.

If your standard editor cannot do this, then PEBCAK.

I'd love to go full tabs. I have a few colleagues who push hard for 100% spaces and 2 spaces for an indent. It's a nightmare.

“space space space space space space space space space space space space”

Well, no.

Most editors used for coding can be configured to use “soft tabs” so 1 press of the tab key will insert N number of spaces, aligned neatly on tab column. After 30 (50?) or so years of this feature being about in many editors, I really shouldn’t expect to have to explain it.

As for real tabs. No. Just no. Not least because if you want to align some text that’s not on a tab boundary you end up with a mixture of tabs and spaces which has already been highlighted as an abhorrence. Using tabs has no discernible advantage today and hasn’t done for many years

The differences in "what a tab" means have obviously caused far too much grief. A modest proposal : add the following character points to Unicode :

U+something or other = TAB EXPANDING TO TWO SPACES

U+next value = TAB EXPANDING TO THREE SPACES

U+next value = TAB EXPANDING TO FOUR SPACES

... up to, say, TAB EXPANDING TO TWELVE SPACES (should be enough for anybody). Tab users can continue to tab, with their intent recorded along with the tab.

(I shouldn't have to point out that the above is not intended seriously. But it occurs to me that, given some of the loopy emoji already in Unicode, there might be a risk that the Unicode consortium itself might take this seriously... (shudders))

NB I'm assuming four spaces is the chosen number

Well, as has been inevitably noted above, five is right out.

Re: What I don't understand

Eclipse always used to, I don't know if it still does.

The Coding Style (or whatever it was called) tab on Eclipse was one of the best formatters/linters I know, and would operate as-you-typed as well as allow you to just "format all" (in essence, though I forget the procedure to do that now).

Re: What I don't understand

If your editor cannot do this natively there may well be an extension to do it.

Re: What I don't understand

They do.

The trouble is that some people refuse to use the tools.

git even has pre-commit and post-checkout rules that could be used to enforce tabs on your end and spaces on mine.

If you could only agree on how big a <tab> is, anyway.

Re: What I don't understand

The Indentation panel of Kate offers exactly this kind of functionality.

Re: What I don't understand

“…. get on with prettying it up for you, and offer the option of stripping it all out anyway when you save out”

What editor are you using? Anything decent (eg - vim, eMacs, <insert editor of choice here>) will usually have a feature to do whatever formatting you want on save. Or load. Or any time you like. And if it’s not built in, said decent editor probably has a plug-in system that can provide such functionality.

Personally, I hate auto-formatters because they never do 100% what I want. But the option is there if you want it

I have notepad++ set up so that a tab key press inserts 4 spaces (and shift tab removes 4)

Best of both worlds

Re: Does it matter?

Or there is "expand" and "unexpand" on Linux. Put them in git hooks as you please and we can all forget this nonsense.

Re: Does it matter?

The python wonk's would have a fucking fit!

it would turn their code into worse garbage than it already is!

Re: Does it matter?

> ...but oddly the tabbed indents aligned but the spaced indents didn't.

Surely that's exactly what you'd expect.

Re: Jeez who cares??

If only there was some way the formatting style could be saved along with the files themselves, then every editor would be able to convert whatever keystrokes you use into the preferred representation for saving. Some sort of platform-independent editor config file perhaps?

Every (decent) code editor in existence can support .editorconfig and it makes the code look consistent whoever edits it. I find myself writing custom editorconfig files for all sorts of imported projects, just to preserve their historical, sometimes arcane, tab/space conventions.

Re: As someone pointed out to me a while ago

That, I didn't know. Thank you for extending my knowledge today.

GJC

Re: As someone pointed out to me a while ago

Very very true, Sir. Whitespaces are not inclusive at all.

Re: As someone pointed out to me a while ago

This is indeed the answer and why tabs should be used, or part of the reason. Visual impairment can also mean having to use huge fonts - space indent means the far too much horizontal scrolling, vs a smaller tab indent size.

Amusingly devs seem to be the most vocal when it comes to display overrides, like dark mode, font size/choice etc, yet when it comes to formatting code for viewing their way is best. Use tabs for accessibility or spaces if you’re the only one ever to look at your code.

proportional fonts for code, there we go!

Re: It's not about the storage, it's about readability

Yes! even back in the days of turbo pascal, i hit the compiler module limit, before i hit the floppy space limit.

Re: It's not about the storage, it's about readability

This. So very much this.

Programmers seem to be a species who tend towards imposing their preferences upon others, which is perhaps the core of this whole argument.

GJC

Re: There's a simple test, really.

I agree that for human readable documents there should only be single spaces. We have CSS for HTML and paragraph styles for wordprocessing and DTP etc.

Some programming systems/editors do unfortunately need tabs and many need multiple spaces to be entered, which is stupid.

Re: Really??? This is a problem? Nothing better to write about?

If you're not using a language with syntactically-significant indentation, your compiler likely won't give a toss about how you format your code, or what specific form your whitespace takes, beyond the fact it's there.

Everyone else who has to read your horrid, inconsistent mess of code will, though.

Re: Really??? This is a problem? Nothing better to write about?

Upvoted for mixing them, never thought about that!

And now my teammates will never forget.. :D

Re: This is liking arguing if VHS or Beta is better ...

Everyone knows Video 2000 was best, you heathen!

As others have noted, nearly every editor has a setting that sets what the tab key does. Press the tab key and, instead of inserting a tab character, it inserts however many space characters you told it to. Press shift+tab and it removes them back to a multiple of the number you set. I use spaces, not because I think spaces are better, but that others think so and I'm willing to go along with them, but I do not press the space key to insert them one at a time. I press the tab key to insert them in chunks of the appropriate size. For the same reason, my editor is also set that, when I press enter to move to a new line, it fills that new line with the same amount of indentation as the last line. Otherwise, I'd have to press tab to indent every line manually and I don't want to.