I personally prefer spaces so that under any circumstances, the code reads the same as the author intended (whether you’re in an editor or viewing a file with a CLI tool). Are we really counting bytes in this day and age?
Alternatively, author chose eight spaces per indent and proceeded to nest things? My tiled windows only have ~100 columns, thanks so much for breaking my workflow with your poor choices.
That being said, I 100% wholeheartedly approve of enforcing code formatting (among other things) on commit. Pre-commit hooks and linters are both awesome.
If you want custom formatting, I don't think that expecting your editor to reformat on the fly is a big ask. At the end of the day that exactly what tab proponents expect.
Which is often unnecessarily difficult for whatever reason, hence my initial comment. Given that tabs already exist there's literally no reason not to use them other than to intentionally spite any future readers who don't agree with your preference for indentation width.
> that exactly what tab proponents expect
Because that capability is built into even the most primitive of text editors since forever. Per-language formatting, on the other hand, is most certainly not.
[1] I'm hyperbolic, sorry if you actually do that although I pity you.
Every line appears to come from the reformat commit. So it's hard to see when the codes function was changed.
I write all my code in notepad.exe with the font Wingdings. I hope that if you ever read any of my code you'll respect my intent with how it's displayed.
Admittedly this is something of an edge case - how many languages other than Lisps involve alternating layers of indentation and alignment? The more common C like languages don't suffer from this at all.
At this point I'm largely convinced that more or less all of our tools, languages, and conventions are poorly thought out, brittle, and inelegant. /rant
(setq zwei:*indent-with-tabs* nil)I think the ideal situation is a language with an official or at least commonly accepted formatter, so that existing and new projects will essentially always follow the same style and you never have to think about it. Like "go fmt" always using tabs. I don't like tabs, but I like that kind of enforced consistency way more than I dislike tabs.
That's also why I like using opinionated third-party formatters like prettier and black. Combined with pre-commit hooks, you almost never have to think about style and can just focus on the code. Plus diffs are cleaner.