this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Tabs are better than spaces
Pressing tab and having the appropriate number of spaces added is objectively the only right answer.
But you can set a tab width instead so any developer editing the code can adjust the indentation width to his liking, without changing the actual files contents and having to worry about setting the editor up to insert the right amount of spaces.
Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment
Tabs could be a good idea if their default size in most environments (and often not configurable) wasn't 8, which is terribly big.
What environment are you using that have tabs set to 8?
Honestly, I can't think of an environment that doesn't have 8-space tabs by default.
Interesting...
Every IDE and editor (gui and tui) I've used has always come preconfigured with a tab-size of 4.
The only thing I've ever experienced having a tab-size of 8 was github, and I thought that was just a problem with a setting from github's size that I quickly set back to 4.
It seems that tui editors come with tab-sizes of 8 only when a config isn't provided, and every environment I've used where I've used a tui editor has always come with sensible configs (for things like config location, language recognition for syntax highlighting, etc...) including a tab-size of 4.
The real hot take: Spaces are better than tabs. Fight me