I know it’s a joke but I prefer the tab option. It’s easy to convert tabs to any particular spacing or code point width. It can also vary, if wanted, based on terminal or editor type.
People with worse eyesight can have a wider indentation while those who choose can opt for something more compact
Honestly I always preferred tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning. It doesn’t break anyone’s experience. And if somebody wants two spaces for a two-space-tab-width for indentation and other people prefer four. That will work just fine.
I hate seeing 2 space indents. Unreadable AF ( to me ). At least this way I can easily work in the same codebase without somebody being annoyed ( except for the crying about the tabs )
Why not tabs for both indentation and alignment? (Actually, I see indentation as just a specific use of alignment.) Word processors have been doing it for decades (and typewriters for over a century!). Surely we can convince our code processors to use user-definable, fixed position tabs instead of relative position “tab = x spaces”.
Keeping the [TAB] character in the file then allows everyone the layout they like.
I can’t imagine it would be difficult for an IDE to scale the width of spaces found at the start of a line, to emulate this same customization while still preserving my sanity as a fervent space-indenter. I’ve never seen an IDE that does this, but it’d be an interesting compromise.
What if instead of having the IDE special case space characters at the start of a line, we had a special character that could represent a variable width space?
I know it’s a joke but I prefer the tab option. It’s easy to convert tabs to any particular spacing or code point width. It can also vary, if wanted, based on terminal or editor type.
People with worse eyesight can have a wider indentation while those who choose can opt for something more compact
Honestly I always preferred tabs for indentation and spaces for aligning. It doesn’t break anyone’s experience. And if somebody wants
two spaces fora two-space-tab-width for indentation and other people prefer four. That will work just fine.I hate seeing 2 space indents. Unreadable AF ( to me ). At least this way I can easily work in the same codebase without somebody being annoyed ( except for the crying about the tabs )
Why not tabs for both indentation and alignment? (Actually, I see indentation as just a specific use of alignment.) Word processors have been doing it for decades (and typewriters for over a century!). Surely we can convince our code processors to use user-definable, fixed position tabs instead of relative position “tab = x spaces”.
Keeping the [TAB] character in the file then allows everyone the layout they like.
Or has working solo for 40 years fried my brain?
I can’t imagine it would be difficult for an IDE to scale the width of spaces found at the start of a line, to emulate this same customization while still preserving my sanity as a fervent space-indenter. I’ve never seen an IDE that does this, but it’d be an interesting compromise.
What if instead of having the IDE special case space characters at the start of a line, we had a special character that could represent a variable width space?