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Comment by greggman3 | Hacker News Reader

major tech companies disagree with you

tabs don't work for customization

    code        // comment
    code code   // comment

If there are tabs between the code and the comments they won't align if you customize their length. If you use spaces there then you're just hypocritical.

There are just as many arguments pro tabs as there are con tabs

Many could be solved with smart tools. Have your editor reformat the text to your preference. Have it put it back to the project's preference when you check it in.

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But nobody defends using tabs for aligning code. The debate is about indentation only.

Tabs are not suited to aligning code, but ideal for indentation.

They aren't really. You have to give up certain common styles. Example

    function(arg1, arg2, arg3,
             arg4, arg5, arg6) {
       code
    }

The line with arg4 on it can't be indented by tabs alone but it's a common coding standard.

Honestly I don't care much if that particular kind of alignment works or not.

As long as you never use tabs after other characters, things will work well enough.

That's alignment, not indentation. Alignment should always be done by spaces.

The people above claimed tabs let you customize. I'm only pointing out as soon as you add alignment that positive goes out the window.

It doesn't go out the window if you can convince people to do it properly.

I think you might be misunderstanding the alignment comment. The idea is that the lines starting with "function" and "arg4" have the same number of tabs, and then the "arg4" line has nine spaces after the tabs.

Great, so lots of mixed invisible characters in the same line. Yea, that's never caused any problems, cough makefiles, cough python, ...

Fortunately all the projects I work on do the proper thing and use spaces ;)

React (FB) says they use spaces: https://github.com/airbnb/javascript#whitespace (react links to the airbnb style guide)

Google: is usually spaces, https://google.github.io/styleguide/jsguide.html#formatting-...

Apple: https://llvm.org/docs/CodingStandards.html#whitespace, https://webkit.org/code-style-guidelines/#indentation-4-spac..., Swift (load xcode, see it inserts spaces in default code projects and with reformatting in xcode, ...)

Mozilla: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/code-quality/coding-..., rustfmt defaults to spaces: https://rust-lang.github.io/rustfmt/?version=v1.4.38&search=...

Python: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/#tabs-or-spaces

PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P

> Great, so lots of mixed invisible characters in the same line. Yea, that's never caused any problems, cough makefiles, cough python, ...

Of all the ways you could object, I feel like listing makefiles and python might make the least sense. Makefiles require tabs and python has zero problems using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment. In fact, python will make it harder to accidentally indent a line wrong than almost any other language.

I'd just say people are more likely to screw up, or something like that.

> PS: I know some projects use tabs (go, linux) for example. I don't work on those :P

Linux requires 8 space indentations so it's the worst of all worlds.

Exactly. The right way in this example would be like this (where '>' is a tab and '_' is a space).

(For a better readability and ease of edition, I however prefer to actually indent arguments (each on it's line) rather than the suggested alignment, as I show in the second function)

    class Something {
    >const obj = {
    >>somePropName: 1,
    >>xyz_________: 2,
    >};
    >function foo(arg1, arg2, arg3,
    >_____________arg4, arg5, arg6) {
    >>code
    >}
    >
    >function bar(
    >>arg1,
    >>arg2,
    >>arg3,
    >) {
    >>code
    >}
    }

A decent editor supports smart tabs

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