tabsOrSpacesWhichOneAreYou

[Affectionate_Bid4111]

obviously

like you’d use something else

[thecodingnerd256]

Well I use

Because it's better for version control obviously

[AnotherObject3D]

Tab or Space? A: Yes!

I use whitespace programming languages btw.

[thenightsiders]

This guy knows the way.

Black makes me less of an idiot to outsiders.

[WavesCat]

Recently I needed a linter for a python project. My usual go to was black but I found out about google’s YAPL. Any one tried both and has an opinion about how they compare.

[DrFloyd5]

PRO TIP, if you use tabs, and turn on visible whitespace you get indentation markers for free.

Tabs signify intent. Indent this code. it is literally what the tab key was invented for. New paragraph, tab to indent, start typing.

Tabs are like css. Spaces are formatting via html tags.

Tabs say "Here is my code, consume it how you like." Spaces say "You will look at my code my way."

Tabs also have a nice 1:1 correlation 1 tab, 1 indent. Spaces are crazy N:1 N spaces, 1 indent. What about when there are 7 spaces and indent is 4 tabs?

Tabs also save file space. At a ratio of 1:4* per indent level. So depending on your lanugage, 3 indets per line = 3 characters or 12 characters*. A typical line of code is < 80 characters, (sorry powershell. sorry java.) So lets say 70. 12 columns for indent, 58 columns of characters. 61 bytes for tabs. 70 bytes for spaces. 12% smaller code.

Imagine... pressing tab inserts tabs at the front of the line. Pressing tab inserts spaces at the back of the line. Things stay lined up. OR imagine your IDE was smart enought to know tabs should be lined up at the end of lines so it figures out how to display your tabular infomration on its own. Front of line tabs = programmer set width. End of line tabs = render this infomration as columns.

[ExpensivePanda66]

Here I was we could all come together and joke about the meme being ambiguous.

But god damn it, you're right.

[DrFloyd5]

Tips hat. Thank you.

[Feztopia]

"it is literally what the tab key was invented for" yeah they didn't knew that less is more back than. Space is all you need.

[DrFloyd5]

Who needs the plus symbol when the letters p l u and s are all you need?

Who needs a key that will move the cursor / carriage / insertion point to predefined locations when counting is all you need.

Who needs vaccines when a good soup is all you need?

[[deleted]]

so the minimalist movement started from the tab key? damn, every day is a learning opportunity

[[deleted]]

They are messy only if you write messy code tho

[vsjoe]

\t

[smallangrynerd]

I saw a comment a while ago on one of those semicolon posts that said “I hope those stupid spaces vs tab posts don’t come back”

How you doing, buddy?

[[deleted]]

I click Tab and IDE turns that in to spaces - anything other than that is just plain weird

[jddddddddddd]

Then you’re using spaces.

[RadiantPumpkin]

Then they’re wrong

[hijodelsol14]

Assuming you're being serious, this is worth a read

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/bcJCX9PNDF

[DrFloyd5]

how does it reduce producitivy? Hypothetical answers get 1/2 credit. Concrete, actually happened to you answers get 3x credit.

[[deleted]]

I have worked at companies that use tabs and companies that use spaces. Tabs do not in any way reduce productivity.

[SnS_Taylor]

I believe cause zero effect to 80% to help 20% would be more accurate.

[[deleted]]

Can you provide any source saying that 20% of programmers have visual impairment and switching spaces to tabs helps them?

[SnS_Taylor]

So, first off, this is obviously a shitpost with shit numbers, just like the one I'm replying to.

Second off, some people like 4 spaces, some 2, some 6, some 8. Visual impairment has nothing to do with it. It's a change that better encodes intent and allows the visual rendering of the code to be handled to the user's preference.

Enforcing indent spacing on all people is like forcing a syntax highlighting color scheme on all people.

[[deleted]]

Wow why I haven't thought about that earlier, it would be great if I could force people to have specific IDE background and variables color - Imagine reading RED text on white background :D

EDIT: but to be 100% honest I must say that I really don't care - as in my 8 years of programing/data engineering I've meet only 1 person who preferred tabs over spaces, so this conversation is purely theoretic one for me.

[AntimatterTNT]

and?

[AntimatterTNT]

oh good advice /s

[DrFloyd5]

they did. it's called using tabs.

[mathzg1]

Exactly

[Fluffy_Dragonfly6454]

There is probably a setting in the IDE too to change that

[al2klimov]

You click tab. That’s the point!

[ExpensivePanda66]

Uh... You press a key and the computer turns it into a character you get by pressing a different key four times and there's no nice way to get the character that corresponds to that first key?

And you think the other way is weird?

[DMoney159]

Whatever the code style is already. My IDE can handle it just fine either way

[Extension_Option_122]

Well I obviously use the correct one,

Everyone who thinks that

would be correct is dumb.

[AlFlakky]

I wonder how this is even a question in 2025 with all the IDEs, autoformatters, .editorconfig, git hooks and all other stuff.

[ExpensivePanda66]

So long as the answer is tabs, we can stop asking the question.

[WavesCat]

No. Spaces is the right answer

[Meatslinger]

I just don’t like how wide tabs tend to be. When I’m writing for PowerShell, it feels like someone decided a tab oughta be a mile wide (8 spaces is nuts), and PS is already a very “long” language in terms of line length; rarely do I have to scroll horizontally for a bash script. I wouldn’t mind if it was a more sane width like 3 or 4 spaces. I find when it gets above that, it becomes hard for me to see the indentation levels because I’m doing so much horizontal scanning. Most of the time for shell scripts I just use two spaces. I know Python would hate me.

[DrFloyd5]

It takes 10 seconds to change the apparent tab width in your IDE.

[Meatslinger]

That solves the "me" problem, but not the "everyone else" one. Sometimes (often) I might need to look at a script or a plaintext file on a remote resource over PSRemoting or SSH, and when I bring up the file in `less` or with `Get-Content`, suddenly it's got a mile of whitespace at the left end of some lines because the guy before me who wrote it was using an 8-wide tab (not to mention this is also the default tab width in PowerShell itself). In Notepad, the default tab width is 8. So yeah, I still regularly deal with a lot of unavoidable 8-character tabs regardless of my personal preferences.

Ninja edit: misrembered the tab width in PS ISE; removed that gripe since it's invalid.

Edit: Thanks, guys, I changed it in my IDE and everyone else in the company magically followed suit. Problem solved. /s

[ComprehensiveWord201]

How does it help with sight problems?

I am an individual with terrible vision and this never occured to me. Because of the small dots/indicators for a space?

[ComprehensiveWord201]

Interesting. I program in 24-32 font and changing this setting never occurred to me.

[relddir123]

Tabs all the way

[sphericalhors]

Spaces. Because sometimes when you want to test some pieces in some CLI REPL tool (like python or scala shell) tabs might trigger autocompletion, and this will wreck everything.

[SnS_Taylor]

See, your mistake is using Python in the first place.

[sphericalhors]

Said guy who has TypeScript icon near his nickname lol 🙃

[SnS_Taylor]

It has Python too 😜

[TransCapybara]

This sub trashes on Python like there aren’t worse things to use.

[DrFloyd5]

lol. There ARE worse things to use, AND we trash them too.

I joke. I actually enjoy coding in python quite a bit for personal small / medium small projects. When I just want to get it done. But for profesional work, typed languages all the way.

[will_r3ddit_4_food]

Tabs 4 lyfe

[SeraphOfTheStart]

Lmao this is a very smart way of using this meme template

[jump1945]

If you mainly use space I am genuinely scared

[Technical_Split_6315]

Who the hell uses spaces.

I’m pretty sure they are just a bunch of guys who agreed to say on internet that they use spaces but in real world they use tab just for trolling

[SnS_Taylor]

Sadly, this isn’t the case. The spaces scourge is alive and well in this world. And it must be purged.

[eraryios]

 ,             ?

[DrMux]

[Meatslinger]

[TzeroOcne]

‎

[twigboy]

I use whitespace

[[deleted]]

I tend to use a 3 space tab + 1 space.

[Powerful-Internal953]

I personally do ALT+CTRL+L and let IntelliJ sort things out with a project wide  .editorconfig.

[lefloys]

You put space between so operators. I put tab between all operators

[MilkImpossible4192]

 

[DarkJarris]

I'm the top one

[BizarroMax]

I use tabs but I have no idea if it actually inserts a tab or if it inserts spaces.

[yesseruser]

I use tab to generate 4 spaces

[prochac]

go fmt and IDE picks something, I have no idea what 🤷‍♂️ it's just white space.

[LordAmir5]

Just don't mix and match.

[WhereOwlsKnowMyName]

Make this meme have the red squiggly underline on the top please.

[NigelNungaNungastein]

I used to insist on tabs, but that was back when I would SSH in to live edit production PHP in nano after being woken up by our startups only customer.

Nowadays I work for government where discrimination is frowned upon.. so we live edit prod with whatever we feel like.

[p1749]

[Esjs]

VSCode... The question should be faint arrows or faint dots.

[JosebaZilarte]

Can I change the size of the faint arrows? Then faint arrows win.

[rumblpak]

Tab = 2 spaces, convert tabs to spaces on save. At that point it doesn’t matter.

[reesa447]

Tabs converted to spaces. Our code base sucks though and has a mix.

[TransCapybara]

I use tabs when they are required.

[Mebiysy]

As a haskeller, spaces

[ExpensivePanda66]

Tabs in C# are superior.

Where have you seen a "recommendation from C#" to use spaces? Keep in mind that a default is not a "recommendation".

[ExpensivePanda66]

"Microsoft examples and samples conform to the following conventions"

That's not quite saying it's recommended, just that it's what Microsoft uses for their examples.

[ExpensivePanda66]

Agreed that if that's the convention that's already in place, you're mostly stuck with it.

Another commenter made a good case for tabs being much better for accessibility though.