Comments on: Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:46:00 +0000

Few people (myself included) are prepared to keep tapping away at the space bar to align with spaces like that. It takes time and it’s annoying with a large spaced alignment. You can hold down the space bar but then it shoots way off too far. Hitting the tab key a few times and then space to align is quicker but wrong if it’s set to add tabs. If it adds spaces for tabs then all is fine.
That said, a good editor will just align under properly when you hit return and insert appropriate tabs or spaces depending on your settings.

Generally I have no issue other than being consistent with whatever other developers use.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 11:02:00 +0000

You’re assuming that advocates of tabs have some strange aversion to using spaces. Which is totally incorrect.

Of course tabs won’t line up with text if you change the tab size. Tabs should *never* be used to line up text; spaces should.

In the ideal world, where programmers are considerate and not arrogant dolts, tabs should would used for indentation. That way another programmer can come along and set an indentation width that is comfortable for them (and their display). If you’re the kind of person who then likes to line things up, you should pad out from the indentation level using spaces.

Now, using tabs and spaces is the ideal solution. But in the real world programmers are lazy, arrogant and inconsiderate. As such spaces definitely seem to have won out, which is quite unfortunate.

However, now that VCS is common-place (and you’d be a fool to develop without it) perhaps we’ll see a reemergence of considerate programming practices. By omitting whitespace altogether from VCS repos, we can allow formatting rules to present code in a way that is comfortable for each developer. Unfortunately for that to happen we need IDEs that are actually capable of properly formatting code to become commonplace.

By: Jon Peterson

Jon Peterson — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:23:00 +0000

I don’t know why Disqus fails so hard at notifying me of responses but…

That’s what I meant. If a bit of code is a continuation of a previous line, I tab over to the start of that line (usually, my editor just clones the tabs from before) and then space out any necessary alignment from there.

I consider a line of code to start at its natural* indentation point, not a cosmetic alignment point (however necessary it may be for readability).

*whichever indentation style is required by your personal or company code cleanliness police.

By: DaveK

DaveK — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:08:00 +0000

I’ve been working in some different companies with differnt tools and different program languages and all I can say: It differs…it’s depending on your infrastructure, the coding language and in fact the way how your company works.
I can work with tabs and spaces, but I totally prefer tabs since they are easy to use and more flexible than spaces. As long as there are some rules about that, it’s nice to have tabs.
And the big positive point about tabs is: If you have some coding beginners in your company, they tend “not to see” some space missings. That means that sometimes you have to review code and recognize that the spacings aren’t correct, because the newbies just don’t see the failures (because they aren’t used to…). Of course, now you’d say that “if they are new in coding, they need to learn how to do it right from the start of their carreer”, but I say, we don’t live in stone ages anymore, we have tools for formatting and with tabs, most of them just know perfectly how to handle. Again, I must say it differs from environment to environment, but overall I’d say, tabs totally win.

By: Batdude

Batdude — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:24:00 +0000

The places I have worked in the past 22 years have all used spaces. So Craigs comment is pointless. This debate will rage on forever. Personally only spaces make sense to me.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Wed, 06 Jun 2012 20:17:00 +0000

The appeal of tabs is that they add some structure to plain text, but if you really wanted structure you would not be coding in plain text anyway. Since virtually every programming language is still coded in plain text, you might as well stick with spaces rather than trying to hack some structure into the code by using tabs.

By: Jeff Vera

Jeff Vera — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 14:30:00 +0000

Giving up because of a default in a product is the definition of lame. Fight the good fight.

By: Fabio

Fabio — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 13:39:00 +0000

I agree with you here Jon.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 12:14:00 +0000

The problem is, not all of the “start of a line” is indentation. Part of that can also be “alignment”. e.g. if I tab some code over from the right to indent it to the appropriate level, that line may also be a continuation from the previous line, at which point I may also be adding spaces after the tabs to align it in some way with the line before. For example, I may space it over to align with a parenthesis. It’s little mistakes like that that can lead people down the all-spaces route. search/replace for spaces to tabs fails because it replaces alignment spaces with indenting tabs.

But, +1 for putting emphasis the code rather than making sure everything is either tabs or spaces.

By: Jon Peterson

Jon Peterson — Sun, 11 Mar 2012 19:48:00 +0000

That’s because that area between the start of the line and the code on that line is referred to as “indentation”, which is what tabs are… and anything beyond that becomes “alignment”, which is (shockingly enough) a completely different thing. Spaces have the latter covered nicely.

In my experience, 90% or better of the whitespace to the left of actual code in any file tends to be indentation, and for that reason, I consider myself a “Tab” coder (since I use them most). But neither excludes the other, and anyone who actually gives a damn about the appearance of their code should do a little bit of reading on the definitions of “indentation” and “alignment”, and get busy coding legibly instead of getting huffy about which method another coder used, or doing a quick Find/Replace All and commit.