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Comment by maybird | Hacker News Reader

(3) You bring up an interesting issue. Why is there so much variance out there? Google uses 2 spaces, the linux kernel uses 8, and most people I know use 4.

Are people using such a wide range of font sizes, and font aspect ratios, that 4 spaces doesn't make sense for everyone?

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I used 3 on my last open source C project, just to troll every faction of the indent war. I actually think it looks pretty nice.

https://raw.github.com/udp/json-parser/master/json.c

indent -kr json.c

problem solved ;-)

When I was writing a lot of C, I settled on 8-column tabs (a style I copied from OpenBSD). Combined with an 80-column wide terminal, it prevents you from nesting too far down — 4 or 5 levels and you keep having to wrap, which is an automatic sign that "something is wrong, I need to refactor this."

I was an 8spcr (default tabstop, tab-to-indent, learned C in pico). I've gone a year or two writing nothing but Ruby (where 2spc is the rule) and recently had to build a small C program, and oh my god is 8spc terrible.

But I'm also a single-return fetishist, so I tend to nest deeper than normal.

It's funny how so many coders take offence at such trivial things. I always get annoyed by cuddled elses, although I don't suppose I could give a rational explanation for this!

I also feel annoyed by cuddled elses. My reason (rationalization?) is that because the else clause is visually further indented it seems to suggest that the clause is somehow less important, and it's also harder to see the structure of the code when the if and else don't align.

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