Tabs vs. Spaces

Posted on March 19, 2006 by Arthur

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

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4 Responses to Tabs vs. Spaces

  1. alfons says:
    March 19, 2006 at 12:57 pm AST

    Tabs, with spaces to align to next tab position.
    Definitely. Also see /usr/src/linux/Documentation/CodingStyle.

    JWZ is wrong here.

  2. Arthur says:
    March 19, 2006 at 1:07 pm AST

    Tabs, with spaces to align to next tab position

    And to how many space have your tabs been set then?

  3. NiElS says:
    March 19, 2006 at 1:27 pm AST

    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!

  4. alfons says:
    March 19, 2006 at 1:43 pm AST

    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.

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