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Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com

Tabs are objectively better than spaces

https://gomakethings.com/tabs-are-objectively-better-than-spaces/

Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them. Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long. Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.

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GuybrushThreepwo0d

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I used to think this way, at least when writing C++. But it's objectively harder to do and convince other people to follow, especially if they can't be bothered to change their environment to display tabs and spaces differently. It's a losing battle so now I just do spaces when working with other people

KIM_JONG

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Always do spaces, because you can never trust how someone else has their tab configured.

How is this even a debate anymore. I thought we all agreed on this years ago.

Pyroglyph

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you can never trust how someone else has their tab configured

Why on earth would I care how someone else has their editor configured? It's none of my business, and none of yours either.

azertyfun

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Because other people are fucking morons and their editor doesn't have visible whitespace enabled - or it does but they don't give a shit.

Therefore these fucking morons have anywhere between 2 and 8 spaces-per-tab configured and will happily mash the tab key however many times is convenient for them to align their code or comments because they don't understand shit about fuck when it comes to alignement (or they don't care). Now I open their file and everything is predictably misaligned. Spaces and tabs are mixed from one line to the next, and in particularly egregious cases no tab width I can locally set on the file will make it readable because multiple different morons used different tab widths to align with tabs - sometimes within the same goddamn function or comment.

Have you ever tried to read an important technical diagram in ASCII art aligned with tabs by different people with different IDE settings? Because I have. Emphasis on tried.

Pyroglyph

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Spaces and tabs are mixed from one line to the next

This is a solved problem: Enforce linting before committing using something like Git Hooks / Husky.

Have you ever tried to read an important technical diagram in ASCII art aligned with tabs by different people with different IDE settings?

No, because we live in the present and use proper tools for diagrams. SVG diagrams tend to be common nowadays. I'm aware you can't read them raw, but realistically the intersection between people who need to read important technical diagrams and people who don't have access to a web browser is vanishingly small (dare I say nonexistent?)

azertyfun

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Tell me you develop with modern languages without telling me you develop with modern languages.

Try linting perl, or bash.

Like yeah if you work on a modern JS/Python/C# project, whatever, whitespace is going to be autoformatted, so the tabs vs spaces debate does not matter AT ALL.

Pyroglyph

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Tell me you develop with modern languages without telling me you develop with modern languages.

You say this like it's a bad thing?

Try linting perl, or bash.

If you're already writing Perl/Bash scripts then it would probably not take you long to write a git hook to check the beginning of each line of source to check if there's a space or a tab character and preventing the commit if the wrong one is found. Crude and far from perfect, but still better than nothing.

if you work on a modern JS/Python/C# project, whatever, whitespace is going to be autoformatted, so the tabs vs spaces debate does not matter AT ALL.

It does though. If you read the original article then you'd know that the advantage of tabs is that everyone can choose exactly how deep their tabstops are, which is an objective benefit over spaces.

azertyfun

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It's not wrong to work with modern languages, but don't pretend that you have the answer to the debate if you don't work in a field where it applies.

Linting bash/perl is a TERRIBLE idea. Consider the following, extremely common piece of code (perl has equivalent syntax as well):

#!/bin/bash

cat > testfile &lt; &lt; EOF
    test1
	test2
EOF

(lol lemmy bug found, can't write the actual "left angled bracket - left angled bracket" syntax, it somehow truncates the comment)

OTOH if you use a modern auto-formattable language, then you can auto-format to tabs with a git hook or IDE plugin (and back for committing) if you want, so the debate doesn't matter in that case. It goes both ways.