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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

I've been using proportional fonts in emacs since many years ago, I can't remember how many. When I find code aligned with spaces to a horizontal position I keep it there. If I have to modify it I realign everything. Example

  a   = 1
  ab  = 2
  abc = 3

becomes

  a = 1
  change = 2
  abc = 3

Nobody ever said a word about it.

In Elixir projects we've been using the language code formatter for years and it forces a coding style like mine by default.

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One of my pet peeves is when I go to the trouble of lining up my indents, usually for some good reason like improving clarity or readability and some busybody comes along and flattens it all for no good reason other than pandering to their own personal aesthetic.

One of my pet peeves is when I go to the trouble of flattening indents, usually for some good reason like improving clarity or readability and some busybody comes along and indents it all for no good reason other than pandering to their own personal aesthetic.

Honestly, I use spaces because virtually all tooling and coding conventions that exist prefer spaces over tabs, but I don't understand how it came that spaces won over tabs in the programming world. So much energy wasted on counting spaces in text documents, it's absurd.

Please engage with the substance of my comment rather than just further iterating the argument that’s in your head. It is equally frustrating whether tabs or spaces.

Who on earth is counting spaces?

I press tab in emacs and it inserts or removes the right amount of spaces to indent the line. I press newline and it creates a new line with the correct space based indentation.

If I'm in Python I can press tab multiple times to cycle through indentation levels or do it manually with space and the deletion keys.

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