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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

I used to be a “tab person” when I started using python in 2001 - after all, it makes more logical sense and it saves bytes, what’s not to like?

And then the world duly standardized on 4-spaces-per-indent.

So I’ve long given up and just gone with the flow. Unless big projects switch to tabs in a coordinated manner, to make a big statement, this matter is unlikely to ever be reevaluated.

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Would be interesting to see a table of spaces per indent vs language or Project.

I know the Linux kernel has an 8 spaces requirement. Code has been known to be rejected based on this violation.

Linux kernel has 1 tab, which many/most would map to 8 (including me). Mapping to 8 has (and not 2 and 4) becomes relevant if you have line size limits.

That struck me as odd surely 8 is the norm - a holdover from typewriters

I'm not sure that indentation should count towards line size limits at all, or at least not more than 1 character per indent. If it doesn't fit on your screen, you can change your tab width until it does.

Linux kernel is 1 tab

Golang also mandates tabs I think

From memory go fmt will use both tabs and spaces when formatting but it uses tabs for indentation from the left margin and uses spaces for some alignment of variables - so it doesn't introduce any crazy interleaving of tabs and spaces which I like.

Correct. And frankly, that's the logical choice. It allows to use different tabwidth for representation, while still aligning variables correctly with spaces. But this only works when you enforce an autoformatter, and way too few languages have a standardized autoformat.

I remember seeing this a while ago: https://ukupat.github.io/tabs-or-spaces/ which is basically what you're talking about.

Of note are Go and a few others, Go because it generally uses gofmt, which uses tabs, as far as I understand.

Ruby standardized on 2 spaces per indentation level.

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