Tabs are objectively better than spaces

You know what is truly better than spaces? PNGs.

With PNGs you always get both the exact same indentation width, but also the same fonts and font colors!

Tab proponents will talk junk about "preserving intention rather than incidental spacing". Space proponents will correctly point out that only spaces preserves alignment. Then don't even notice when the same code viewed on two different computers renders with two different FONTS!

Space lovers pretend alignment is super important, but are ignoring the biggest contributor to rendering differences!

Once you accept that preserving visual representation, aka rasterization, and not intention (tabbing) is important you unlock a world of options. With pngs you color code sections. You can mix fonts to mark meaning.

Best of all: once your editor is png aware the entire experience is transparent! Tabs are a cludge for outdated editors, real editors include powerful optimizations to OCR spaces/pngs into usable text files.

These are the sort of controversial articles on Hacker News I come here for.

I'm practice, it seems my life is easier to live with others if I use spaces. But the tab is conceptually simple. It means indent, or something almost like "next-column". Spaces mean separation from words or tokens. So you are creating a new token as a compound of existing tokens when the original token already exists.

Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment. This is the way

Tools should handle this so we can stop talking about it.

It’s an indictment of our “profession”’s ability to build even half-decent tools for ourselves that we’re still talking about this. No wonder most of what we produce for others is a usability nightmare. We can’t even make nice things for our own use.

(Yes, I know, this is basically solved in a handful of ecosystems… and yet, this is on the front page in 2023)

"Per-developer visual indent width" feels like the strongest argument for using tabs on a project, as virtually all editors let you choose the visual tab width.

That said, the visual indent width seems like something that ought to be solved with editor software regardless of the tab type. Editors already transparently solve many problems with indentation (e.g. automatically detect the indentation type, indent x spaces when you press tab, continue indent on newline, unindent when you type a closing brace, etc).

Good editor support for indent width preferences would help folks comfortably work on any project regardless of its indentation type.

And as a side note, it would be nice to reserve big ol' wide tabs for tabular data. Using them as logical indentation feels a bit like a shoehorn.

its really time to move past this. two good outs are using an actual schema for storing code instead of flat text, or to have programs that reformat. the former is a stretch, but I find the latter really convenient even I'm working alone - I don't have to fuss about, I can just do stuff and hit the 'make it look nice' button.

I was writing a comment about why I think spaces are better, specially with auto-formatting but now...

I feel like tabs could be better if you let the auto-formatter do its job by setting the tab width to 4 spaces. That should be good enough so that people with a tab width of 2 or 8 don't see the code lines neither very short nor very long. I also feel like most people who use spaces are good with a tab width of 4?

I also would not take into account tab widths not in [2, 8].

Automatic, uniform formatting, a la gofmt or rustfmt is actually the best. Once you have more than a single person working on a project, consistency matters most.

> What matters is that tabs let developers control how much space each indent has, while also allows you to set it to your preferred size. Everyone wins!

Couldn't you make a custom font with a ligature between two spaces that then takes up more horizontal space?

That way, you could still control how big each indent is, yet still use spaces.

I used to be faithful disciple of the Tab, not least as it separates logical structure (an indent) from display (2/4/whatever spaces).

However I have since recanted my heresy, because a space is a space is a space is a space and there is only so much that can go wrong with that.

These discussions are why I just stick to whatever the broader community decides. Like gofmt, eslint, etc.

Why waste my time bikeshedding over bs like tabs or spaces or this or that? I’m just trying to build awesome stuff, not bikeshedding.

Ship software. Solve problems. Print money.

I was reading about the theological diatribes that early christians fought and died for. To a modern reader some of them seem so moot and inconsequential... Then I remembered that I hold strong opinions about the tabs vs spaces debate.

Maybe we should compromise in the debate between tabs and spaces and have one of each.

Come back when you prove that tabs are subjectively better, since that’s the only thing that moves anyone to action.

Who cares? It's for this reason I don't use either. Everything is just left-aligned. I haven't touched Fortran in ages, and don't think anybody complaining about either tabs or spaces has either. Just write code and don't think about it. Use a formatter to pretty up your code, if you please.

Perhaps, but the truly leet coders don’t use any indentation at all

Richard Hendricks fell down some stairs trying to prove this.

Is religious debate allowed on HN? :)

Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not. That’s it. That’s the entire reason why tabs are WORSE.