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Comment by GnarfGnarf | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what's so bad about tabs. With tabs, all you have to do is adjust the settings in your editor, and each programmer gets the indentation (s)he wants: 2, 4, 8, whatever...

Also, do you really want to be pressing the space bar twelve times, instead of tabbing three times?

I've seen the results of spaces-only: inconsistent, sloppy indentation, 7 or 9 spaces instead of 8, as long as it looks "indented" enough.

How, specifically does the tab character "not seem to have worked out at all"?

I'm not saying you're wrong for using spaces, just wondering...

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Don't confuse the tab character with the tab key.

The key is great. I use it all the time. Of course I don't want to press the space bar twelve times instead of tabbing three times. Of course I don't want sloppy indentation with 7 or 9 spaces instead of 8. Is this an actual problem? I've literally never seen either one in ~25 years of using languages that need indentation. The editor takes care of it.

The problem with the tab character is that there's no standard for how wide they're supposed to be, and so everyone uses them differently. Sure, in theory you use one tab character to indicate one level of indentation, and everybody can be happy. In practice, they're often not used that way. People will use two-space tabs with four-space indentation, using two tab characters to indent. People will use eight-space tabs with four-space indentation, using four spaces for one level of indentation, a tab character for two levels, a tab character followed by four spaces for three levels, etc. Some people just blithely mix and match for no particular reason. Put either one into an editor with different tab settings and it explodes into a huge mess.

Just use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment.

While you might do so, anyone you collaborate with will probably not do that. Why? Because almost every code editor in existence comes with that option turned off. And many of them don't even have that option at all! If you expect your codevelopers to manually adjust the alignment to be spaces rather than tabs on each line they edit, when their editor doesn't even distinguish tabs from spaces, oh boy.

Tabs just don't work out in a collaborative environment. It is too complicated for a heterogenous editing environment to get correct, so no such environment gets it correct in practice and code ends up a huge mess.

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