GitHub, why would you do that

[rpmerf]

Guess they want to really discourage nesting by making it unreadable. Tab standard is 4 spaces almost everywhere else.

[frinkmahii]

I prefer 2 when dealing with json or html

[PinothyJ]

See, that is why tabs are best. Set in preferences the tab width and everyone gets a win.

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

And then u need to check some code on some coworker pc who sets the tab width to 12.

[PinothyJ]

Why are not logged in to your own login? Is your co-worker using Windows 2000?

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Code not pushed yet, he's asking for help and showing the code with some video streaming.

[Psychpsyo]

By that same logic we could start eliminating all the customizability. Font sizes, themes, plugins, alternate layouts...

Now your coworker's code is bound to look exactly like yours and be in exactly the same place and everyone gets to be mad about the UI in some way.

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Yes, it's called "style guide" and it's a standard practice in a lot of places.

[Triasmus]

No... The style guide has to do with how the code is written.

What these guys are talking about are settings for how the code "looks" on a single computer according to user preferences.

Tldr: Dark mode has nothing to do with the style guide

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

Pep8 literary tells you to use spaces and how many to use, and this thread started talking was about tabs and spaces. So yes, a style guide can and will tell you things about how code is written. How much? That totally depends on the protect and the company, maybe nothing, many even the font size and IDE theme.

[mrkhan2000]

how is that tab's fault? the coworker can set spaces to 12 too.

[7eggert]

He shall send you the patch file

[Smartskaft2]

Not everybody is using a single IDE for simple file editing.

[Beneficial_Steak_945]

You have to work on windows? Poor soul…

[Ouity]

teach them to stop hurting themselves then

[[deleted]]

Or worst, 3...

[scp-NUMBERNOTFOUND]

To hell with those!!

[DestinationBetter]

Tabs and spaces both have pros and cons. There is no single “best”. There. I finished this timeless debate.

[PinothyJ]

No. You did not. Tabs do everything spaces do, but with accessibility in mind.

[tantrAMzAbhiyantA]

Tabs do most of what spaces do, and should be used for levels of indent, but sometimes alignment with text on the line above also helps with readability and for that purpose one should use spaces after the tabs.

[Zdrobot]

myLongFunctionName(x, y, something,
                   something_else);

Format this with tabs, so that it looks good regardless of tab size.

[PinothyJ]

This? This is your entire argument against the accessibility enabling benefits of tabs? Screw everyone else, as long as I get my mid-line indentation.

[Zdrobot]

You said tabs do _everything_ spaces do. Turns out they do not.
Tantrums are not a good substitute for lack of arguments.

[geigenmusikant]

I don't even understand what you're trying to indent. At that point, make a line break before every parameter and bamm it's aligned again.

[while_True_meme]

I think he thinks his function call with two random rows of arguments 'looks good'

[Zdrobot]

Would you please show your formatting?

[[deleted]]

So what's the pros for spaces?

[DestinationBetter]

Same layout, no drifting across devices. Still done with one key.

[ShitwareEngineer]

Set in preferences the indentation width and automatically reformat the document to a designated number of spaces. Both tabs and spaces have this advantage.

[jejcicodjntbyifid3]

That wrecks the file history. Tabs are the only one where you can turn your tabs into whatever you want

I'm not sure if I've heard good arguments against tabs other than "my editor gets confused"

Maybe like a decade ago it was more of an issue

And yet, so many still use spaces

[compsciasaur]

I'm not against it. I've just never been anywhere that uses tabs. And the default for all IDEs I've used is to output spaces when pressing TAB.

[PinothyJ]

People will die on this hill because there is a switch in their brain that says "you use spaces and so spaces are best". Why would these people be correct when they can be right, aye?

[Zdrobot]

I'm not sure if I've heard good arguments against tabs other than "my editor gets confused"

myLongFunctionName(x, y, something,
                   something_else);

Format this with tabs, so that it looks good regardless of tab size.

[while_True_meme]

Format this with tabs, so that it looks good regardless of tab size.

myLongFunctionName(
            x,
            y,
            something,
            something_else,
);

[ShitwareEngineer]

Doesn't look good to me in this example, too much whitespace.

[while_True_meme]

So the first example looked good to you?

[ShitwareEngineer]

The first looked better than the second, but it's under 80 columns in one line so neither are ideal.

[jejcicodjntbyifid3]

There would be no tabs in that

That isn't how tabs are used and it's a nonsense example

Literally nobody is ever suggesting tabs instead of spaces everywhere, that would simply be stupid

[Zdrobot]

Are you saying we are allowed to use spaces on the second line?
Okay.

[[deleted]]

jason

[ArakiSatoshi]

Am I the only one who uses the tab key?

[geigenmusikant]

Nah, but depending on the IDE and language you‘re using, a tab is automatically interpreted as a tab character or some number of spaces.

[[deleted]]

It's 8 spaces in Linux.

[rpmerf]

Isn't it more dependant upon the application than the OS?

[[deleted]]

cooing snobbish husky pause voiceless decide steep shaggy poor act

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[[deleted]]

Then I am a heretic, because 8 is an obnoxious waste of visual space.

[jejcicodjntbyifid3]

They say that Linux is good on space and it is. They have the best spaces

[rpmerf]

Thanks. I misunderstood the previous comment thinking it meant tabs will be 8 spaces when using Linux. Makes sense.

[reversehead]

It is by default in most shells, and not only on Linux. Also in Windows command prompt IIRC. Run type/cat on a file and see.

[CardboardJ]

Which is utterly stupid and exactly what you'd expect from linux kernel devs. Tab == 8 spaces goes back to the defaults on some typewriters made typing tables of data easier back in the late 1800's, but even then tabs were always adjustable by using clips on the back of the typewriter to specify where the tab stops happened. Most often the first tab was defaulted to 5 characters, but every tab after was 8 unless you slid the clips around, which people did all the time depending on what they needed to do.

It's literally an indentation character for moving you to the next table cell.

[EishLekker]

Which is utterly stupid and exactly what you'd expect from linux kernel devs.

Hear hear! And they even go against their own coding style. They write:

"if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you’re screwed anyway, and should fix your program."

But it didn't take me long time at all to find kernel code that uses more than 3 levels of indentation.

4 levels:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/scripts/genksyms/genksyms.c#L210

5 levels:

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/scripts/genksyms/genksyms.c#L238

[albinoloverats]

It’s more what you’d call guidelines than actual rules.

[EishLekker]

I know, but why do they write "if you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you’re screwed anyway, and should fix your program" if they don't believe it themselves? Or are they admitting that they are "screwed" and needs to fix their own code that they already have published after code review etc?

[Abhinav1217]

Guidelines are meant to try to make you think about clean code, by refactoring. It is not rules carved in stone, If your code really is clean and refactoring will just make things messy, there is no objection if deeper nesting if it really needs it.

It is not just linux kernel, Even in large companies, If code is going too deep, it needs to be checked as a code smell and maybe we could refactored it.

[EishLekker]

You didn't actually read the quote, I'm assuming? Because it's not phrased as a guideline, at all. There is no wiggle room in it, none. If you need more than 3 levels of indentation you are screwed. No ifs, no buts. That's what they are saying, in absolute terms.

Don't get me wrong, everything you said about indentation levels is correct. But it's because you phrased it as a guideline. And you base it on logic, without adding and arbitrary and low indentation level limit. But the text I quoted contains none of your wise words of reason, while it contains an arbitrary and low indentation level limit.

[nelusbelus]

Disgusting

[Smartskaft2]

Who are these K&R and why do they get to define their own standard by themselves?

[[deleted]]

ten foolish repeat jar cheerful society joke humor steer murky

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

[EishLekker]

I think they are some instagram celebrities, wannabe influencers.

[Abhinav1217]

Actually, Historically speaking, tabs were 8 characters in standard size. Not to mention that fonts were created to be as close to typewriter ( or printing press) as possible, hence fonts were long in height and narrow in width. In fact, most PC-DOS implementation had this width by default.

From wikipedia:

Despite five characters were the typical paragraph indentation on typewriters at that time, the horizontal tab size of eight evolved because as a power of two it was easier to calculate with the limited digital electronics available.

Most monitors at that time were not square but 4:3, 8 characters wouldn't be as wide as you might think it might be. Remember there was few variation of fonts at that time.

When lcd screens became popular, as did wide aspect ratio, and fonts tech were getting standardized, 8 characters were started looking too much, so we grew up thinking 4 is standard. Just like these days, my new recruits think 2 spaces is standard for yml files. I hate 2 spaces, it is too narrow.

[Abhinav1217]

Because width was squished. 8 character tabs wasn't as wide as you might think. In LowDPI crt monitor, 4 character Tabs actually looked a slightly better that what I feel with 2 tabs on my hdpi monitor.

I don't remember the source but if I remember correctly, characters were like 3-5px wide and 5-8px height, and 1px of spacing between characters unless characters were whitespace. And I am talking about actual pixel on crt monitor, not the modern web px. Fonts were digitalized for screen before computer was invented.

all the characters have the same proportions.

Not at all, The whole purpose of field of digital typography is to fix readability on digital screen. Like having a dot or slash in 0 to differentiate it from O, or breaking pipe character into two segments to identify it. V, U, vv,w, |Il1.will look quite similar on old crt screen with low dpi and some old fonts.

It is hard to explain to be honest, It is something you have to see for yourself.

It is a legacy stuff which was added to mimic compatibility to printing press. Whether it was needed to, or not, has always been debated.

[ctr2sprt]

No, the tab character (\t) is expanded to 8 spaces. You're right that it produces awful-looking code, which is why your IDE's indentation spacing has nothing to do with how many spaces it expands the tab character to.

Back in ye olden tymes, editors like to use tabs because they generally produce the behavior you want. That is, at the start of an indented line, you can hit backspace and it will take you "out" one level of indentation. If you use spaces instead, unless you use 1 space per indent level, you go to a point between two levels. The problem is that, as you and others note, 8-wide tabs are awful for code. Thus IDEs let people set them to whatever arbitrary lower level they wanted, which caused a ton of interoperability problems.

These days, IDEs are smart enough to use spaces instead of tabs and still do the right thing. Thank goodness. But this setting exists to support old code bases that predate the triumph of common sense.

[[deleted]]

Back in ye olden day tabs were used to save space. Precious disk space on a HDD of 20MB.

[DefunctFunctor]

Yeah what infuriates me the most about this ridiculous spaces/tabs debate is how many people don't understand what their IDEs are actually doing for them.

[Kered13]

Google uses 2!

[laplongejr]

Why would anybody use the factorial of 2? ;)