Tabs vs Spaces

You really made me think about it very, verrry hard. And I think i understand now, i don’t type like professional typist, and although i use most of my fingers my left hand is on far left side of keyboard, instead being closer to the middle. If I had my hands on keyboard like I should I would not be using tab key so much probably, because space is much more accessible.

Now I understand why people would use space key for indenting.

The thing you should NOT do is to change the tab size, this is what is really really evil. All the issues in the “Tabs are evil” come from this. If tab size is always the same then mixing tabs and spaces is not problematic. Also a lot of things assume that tab size is 8, printers for example.

Setting tab size and using that to indent will guarantee 2 things:

• While it might look good in your editor, with your settings, the rest of the world will curse as they have to reindent your code to be able to read it.
• Alignment becomes practically impossible, which is bad as alignment is good

So don’t change tab size. If you don’t like using tabs, with tab size 8, then set so you only use spaces. Please.

Robert

LOL. This is so good! #spacesftw

Hmm, I am probably gonna make to switch to spaces then. Just gonna use TAB a shortcut for 8 spaces in my editor.

Thank you for the insights everyone.

@chrismccord You really hit the spacebar 4 times when defining a function? Seems like the tab key might be a productivity boost for you

Not often when your editor correctly maintains indentation levels

Let’s all go back to punching programs in punchcards. Then we didn’t have this problem…

There was once an article that showed the % of projects on GitHub that used tabs or spaces for different languages. The one for Ruby was like 98% spaces—I’d love for Elixir to have the same % so we can stop bikeshedding!

I think the best solution is to use two spaces. It’s like in Ruby, but it’s a rule from a community guide.

so tabs are not bad
Spaces and tabs have their advantages and disadvantages that is necessary to know before choosing them, so everyone can choose spaces or tabs, paying attention to style of code that he/she prefer.
I prefer to use tabs. I am writing code that looks good with them and I have no problem with readability.