By people on both Reddit and HN.
OvermindDL1
net
kelvinst
NobbZ
But now we have half of a year later. I wrote and read code written by many people. waded through formatted source code of many kinds (manually vs. tool) and I came to a conclusion at about year change and I am in a transition phase since then.
I migrate slowly to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. At least when I have the choice. For languages that have an official formatter or projects that use a style guide I adhere to those though (even when I am not always the same opinion as those guidelines or tools 
).
@OvermindDL1 already did his point about this in Tabs vs Spaces - #27 by OvermindDL1 and I do understand it fully after using that style experimentally for about 3 months now in some C++ code I am hacking at for internal usage.
At least I will stick to this until elastic tabstops get proper support in the tools I use (emacs and VS code) and are not formatted away by the toolset I use (eg. mix format or go fmt).
3
sashang
NobbZ
Why? Who forces me to do so? Who does even realize if I render it with a width of 2 locally or maybe 3?
2
sashang
Nobody is forcing you to. Problem with the GNU style is that your tabs have to be set to render 8 spaces so that alignment in the source code looks right. Reason is code is indented with 2 spaces but every 8 spaces are converted to tab characters. So if you don’t set you editor to convert every 8 spaces to tabs (not 4 or 3 or 2), then code just looks misaligned. I contributed a tiny change to gcc libstdc++ a long time ago but spent a disproportionate amount of time reading the code and I remember thinking how crazy the GNU style was. For example just
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/master/gcc/c-family/c-semantics.c
and open the file in your editor. If your tabs are set to render as 8 spaces then indentation will look right. If not then things will be misaligned.
0
NobbZ
Well, this falls under mixing tabs and spaces for indentation, and this is what I consider bad style. If there are consistently used only tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, the actual tabwith will be irrelevant.
1
ShalokShalom
To be honest, I see so benefits for educational reasons as well:
You can teach the difference between alignment and indentation.
As always, is it important to be explicit about everything, especially as newbie. To mix up alignment with indentation leads to a lack of understanding about both concepts, since it seduces you to assume that both is the same.
I will do this so now, thanks a lot ^-^
1
OvermindDL1
Hmm, that is not really something I distinguish, but that is good to focus on… I’ll do that. ^.^
1