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.
That’s not how you should mix tabs and spaces for alignment. You use the same number of tabs as the previous line, and then fill the remaining width with spaces. That way, when you change tab width, the alignment spaces will always start in the same column as the line they’re aligning to, regardless of the tab width.
Do most editors do that by default? If so, that’s great – if not, it’s just a downside for tabs, if you need to hit enter, backspace out the automatic indents and then press space 30 times rather than just hit enter and have it aligned automatically.
vim seems to auto-insert tabs when you hit enter mid-function definition, at least with standard settings.
That seems like a problem with Vim, then… Typically I don’t align at all, so I’m not familiar with editor behavior for alignment; I prefer to just indent one level deeper.
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That’s not how you should mix tabs and spaces for alignment. You use the same number of tabs as the previous line, and then fill the remaining width with spaces. That way, when you change tab width, the alignment spaces will always start in the same column as the line they’re aligning to, regardless of the tab width.
Do most editors do that by default? If so, that’s great – if not, it’s just a downside for tabs, if you need to hit enter, backspace out the automatic indents and then press space 30 times rather than just hit enter and have it aligned automatically.
vim seems to auto-insert tabs when you hit enter mid-function definition, at least with standard settings.
That seems like a problem with Vim, then… Typically I don’t align at all, so I’m not familiar with editor behavior for alignment; I prefer to just indent one level deeper.