There’s an interesting collection of links in this Metafilter thread ‘Spaces vs. Tabs’. I, naturally, use spaces when indenting code. Two of them, actually, so, I’m with JWZ: Tabs don’t belong in plain ASCII files.
But skimming the replies in that particular thread, this particular comment stood out:
“Tabs. When it absolutely, positively has to line-up.”
That gives a whole new meaning to WYSIWYG programmer.
Slightly related comments
Tabs, with spaces to align to next tab position.
Definitely. Also see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle.
JWZ is wrong here.
Tabs, with spaces to align to next tab position
And to how many space have your tabs been set then?
When possible I setup my editor to indent using two spaces when I hit tab.
I suppose I could also be happy if editors display tabs as 2 spaces. The real tab is just too much!
I prefer 8, but 4 is fine with me too. 8 is mostly to enforce brevity + lines no longer than 80 characters.
Tab is a valid ascii char anyway.