The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious • Hacker News Board

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#71

Post by lesuorac » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

rafram wrote: post #50

lesuorac wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You use tabs to delimitate tabular data. Unless you're trying to argue that your code is a tsv file then tabs is the wrong thing to use.

You use line feeds (\n) to instruct your teletype machine to feed in one more line of paper. Unless you're trying to argue that your text editor is a teletype machine, then line feeds are the wrong thing to use.

I think most people are pretty amenable to the argument that text editors are teletype machines.

Nobody cares that phone calls happen over fiber now instead of telephone lines. So, same should apply to teletype. Nobody is going to care you're reading this over fiber instead of a telephone line.

Now, people do care if they're trying to read a csv document and somebody didn't quote their commas within strings and now the values are in the wrong columns which could've been avoided by using tabs to store tabular data.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#72

Post by IncreasePosts » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:51 PM UTC

hotsauceror wrote: post #13

Not that one more opinion in this endless war of opinion will matter, nor will it convince anyone, but I genuinely don't see the issue with "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment."

Indentation is alignment

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#73

Post by deafpolygon » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #31

jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

Exactly. Indentation != spacing. And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.

honestly, spaces shouldn't be used; it's a design issue- use tabs only for indentation, then the language should ideally support not having to use spaces for manual alignment.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#74

Post by frizlab » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

moomin wrote: post #64

mjburgess wrote: post #2

The point of the "tab" option is that there is no consensus on the number of spaces to use -- so by using tab, one uses a single character, and allows the developer to determine screen spacing to their comfort. "Tab" being a live option is a symptom of the war-never-over in absolute spacing degree -- since different people have different eye-sight, eye-strain, etc. constraints, different linguistic familiarities, cod…

I’d say that one’s approaching resolution, too. And 4 has won.

I use tab at three. And will do to the day I die.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#75

Post by konart » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:53 PM UTC

Thankfully all the go code I'm working with has tabs.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#76

Post by TheAceOfHearts » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:54 PM UTC

This tabs vs spaces nonsense debate has gone on way too long, mostly because people cling on to terrible legacy text editors. Any modern text editor should allow you to write a simple plugin to display tabs or any combination of leading spaces as whatever indentation amount you prefer.

Projects should just pick whatever standard is most popular for their given language, and then people can tweak their editors for personal preferences.

If you encounter a lot of code on the web then you might consider writing a browser plugin.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#77

Post by frizlab » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:55 PM UTC

jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

I don’t like go, but at least they got that right!

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#78

Post by frizlab » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:56 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #22

The war is mostly over because regardless of it you use tabs or spaces, the many modern languages use a code formatter and reformat to whatever is common. Languages that go with tabs are also now routinely mixing it with spaces for visual alignment and assume a certain tab width for total visual width enforcement. On the other hand editors often now handle spaces as if they are tabs, even for cursor movement. So well…

And yet, navigating the code, you still have to got left-left-left-left to pass the indentation and it’s stupid. Tabs are here, everybody should use them, they are the logical better option, everybody knows it.

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#79

Post by vbezhenar » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:56 PM UTC

throwawayqqq11 wrote: post #31

jihadjihad wrote: post #4

Rob Pike on why Go is indented with tabs [0]: > How wide should the indentation be? 2 spaces? 4? 8? Something else? > By making the indent be a tab, you get to decide the answer to that question and everyone will see code indented as wide (or not) as they prefer. > In short, this is what the tab character is for. 0: https://groups.google.com/g/golang-nuts/c/iHGLTFalb54/m/zqMo...

Exactly. Indentation != spacing. And thats all the argument i need. I dont understand why people argue with consistent text layout for all-spaces. You can use tabs to indent and spaces to align after that, in most cases.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/1sq7sp/tab...

Re: The Tabs vs. Spaces war is over, and spaces have emerged victorious

#80

Post by tinco » Fri, Jul 25, 2025, 7:56 PM UTC

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #22

The war is mostly over because regardless of it you use tabs or spaces, the many modern languages use a code formatter and reformat to whatever is common. Languages that go with tabs are also now routinely mixing it with spaces for visual alignment and assume a certain tab width for total visual width enforcement. On the other hand editors often now handle spaces as if they are tabs, even for cursor movement. So well…

No one who uses tabs would ever assume a certain tab width for visual alignment. What do you base that slanderous statement on?

I've also never heard anyone argue that someone else should configure some different tab width, is there a specific language ecosystem you were in that had these insane takes?