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Comment by mozumder | Hacker News Reader

4 spaces? seriously? Why would anyone type out 4 spaces instead of one tab?

Personally, i use tabs of size four with expandtabs setting. That way i don't have to press four spaces and my files look the same across all editors and platforms.

I thought everybody does that..who the hell would type space 4 times?

(The last episode of Silicon Valley referenced the tabs vs. spaces debate with exaggerated examples of hitting the space bar four times to indent. This probably isn't a serious question.)

A good reason for sticking to monospace characters is that they're always displayed the same, regardless of your personal editor and editor configuration choices.

Also, you don't need to type 4 (or however many) spaces directly. Most programming editors can be configured to insert spaces when you press tab, or to replace existing tabs in a file to spaces.

You configure your editor to expand a tab into four spaces.

Virtually everyone does type one tab and uses a text editor that expands the tab to four spaces in the file.

Yep. I've never really understood why editors tend to replace the tab with spaces, though. It seems to work pretty much the same when indenting, but involves more backspacing and introduces more potential for error (eg. deleting 3 spaces instead of 4) when deleting.

What is the advantage that spaces have over tabs?

They ensure uniformity regardless of how your editor is set up. E.g. the default vim setting is to display tabs as eight spaces, which means that viewing a file with tabs (or, even worse, a mixture a tabs or spaces) will look differently if viewed on a newly-set server than in my regular IDE (which is set to display a tab as four spaces).

Atom at least treats soft tabs as tabs for the most part, when you backspace into a soft tab it will delete all 4 spaces at once.

There's that balance between readability and being able to operate in highly nested structures and for loops while all kinds of matrix multiplication in AI/ML for example. Minimizing wrapping is important here and you do with 4 spaces, not 8.

Richard Hendriks? Is that you?

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