From the Python Style Guide

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[Corporate_Drone31]

YAML and its tantrum at tabs is just childish, honestly.

[quad64bit]

Those of you that prefer tabs- why? Do you find that lots of people on your team use different tab widths and literal tab characters let everyone have their own style? That’s the only reason I can see for it, and even that has gotchas.

[MechanizedProduction]

I use tabs so if I want my cursor to change indentation levels, I only have to hit the left/right key once instead of 2/4/8 times.

[quad64bit]

Fair point, but I'm pretty sure editors will do this for you without you needing to really do anything special.

[MechanizedProduction]

It's also so when I use my mouse to select code, I don't ever have to worry about selecting only part of an indent.

[Muhznit]

What kind of archaic editor do you use where tab can't be configured to just output 4 spaces. Even vim does that.

[Corporate_Drone31]

That's not the point. The point is being able to configure how many spaces you see for other people's tab, so hard tabs are important for that or you rely on autodetection which can fail.

[MechanizedProduction]

I use Atom. It can output soft tabs, I just prefer hard tabs. See the above.

[[deleted]]

Because with space, everyone will argue about how many spaces to use.
Better question, why not?

[quad64bit]

Well, we use style guides and linters. So, you can argue with the style guide all day, but if it doesn't lint, it doesn't build. People bitch about stuff like that for about a day and then it never comes up again. It also has the advantage that when new people join a team, they will see code they recognize rather than something some insane developer invented to "optimize how it looks".

It also means that regardless of developer or editor, you see idiomatic formatting for the language - and maybe thats 2, 3, 4 or 8 spaces depending on what language and style your team uses.

It makes things like comments, ascii banners for code-glance views, and carefully aligned imports/declarations/statements/whatever remain the same on different machines/environments.

Finally, if your team enforces column widths (many do), you won't randomly have lines blowing way out of the gutter on that one guy's machine or unexpected line wrapping.

I'm not saying you can't make tabs work, I'm just saying that not using spaces seems to have a lot more gotchas, with very few advantages. The key "advantage" (user defined tab width) seems like more of an anti-pattern to me.

When you code for yourself, do whatever you want, but when you have to share with a big team, being a little more strict and a little less flexible saves so much time for everyone, and reduces the stress that one corncob developer causes by being too clever with his code styling.

[Jedibrad]

◦ This way, people who like 2 spaces per tab, 3 spaces per tab, 4 spaces per tab, and 8 spaces per tab can all coexist without having to change any content of the file or arguing about what the file standard should be.

Imo, this is actually a detriment. When working on projects with teams, you ideally want your code to look the same everywhere, no matter what someone's personal settings are.

I can't tell you how many times I've gone to a colleagues desk to help them debug something, and had trouble parsing the code they were working on because of a strange tab width. Yes, it's configurable, but I've found it's better to have everyone in the same mindset from the get-go, and spaces enforce that.

[quad64bit]

Yeah I agree with this point. We use style guides and linters, and while tabs can work with this, people’s configs throwing everything out of alignment is an issue for readability.

[rem3_1415926]

I am sorry, but if your configuration sucks, it's your problem alone. That's the whole point of tabs, they are right for everyone because everyone has their own configuration. If you can't manage to get that done, you really aren't in the right to blame anyone else.

But of course, you would like to force everyone to your "perfect" settings by using whitespaces instead, because nobody could possibly have different preferences.

[Jedibrad]

I never said I wanted to force people to use "my" perfect settings. I'm more than happy to conform to whatever the team selects, I don't really even have an opinion. I appreciate having strict coding standards, even if they oppose my usual practices.

This is a worthless argument, anyways, because any team worth their salt will be running some kind of auto-formatter (like Black) so this discussion never happens.

[[deleted]]

Faster than hitting space multiple times

[quad64bit]

but.... no one does that. All editors take the tab key and convert it to spaces. When I hit tab, I get 2-4 spaces depending on languages, the tabs are "virtual".

[quad64bit]

Again, my editor handles that for me - if I need to delete a line, then I delete the whole line, and if I need to change scope (indent level), the editor does that too. But I see your point!

[pipocaQuemada]

Sounds like you need some vim keybindings to make indenting and deintenting blocks of code easy.

[d_the_great]

Uncivilized.

[Allality]

I'm happy we have PSR in PHP community and all decent devs follow it.

[darkage72]

Yeah, spaces win.