Hacker News Reader

How many people here use tabs? I find them pure evil. If I press left/right arrow, I want to move one character/space. Not 4/8.

edit: obviously I setup tab to insert 4 spaces etc

View on HN

I prefer tabs way more than spaces. It's faster to indenting back and better for search regexps, quite an important point for me. With Vim it's easy to retab a text if needed anyway.

With vim you need sts. It lets you you backspace over spaces just like tabs. Now I never need tabs anymore.

I don't understand your point about search regexps.

Thanks for the softtabstop tip, that was a life saver as I'm forced to used spaces. For the regexps I'm used to search for tabs to distinguish lvalues but two spaces are the same for that patterns.

the indenting commands work the same way in vim with tabs or spaces -- either select a visual range and hit >, or hit >a} to indent a brace delimited block, or... well, you know the drill. the > or < compose in the same way you'd expect any other vim command to do.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com