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Comment by dvh | Hacker News Reader

Not to brag but https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/neo/idlib/Heap.c... (from line 154 down) that seems like another point against using tabs.

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Adding ts=4 fixes it:

https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/neo/idlib/Heap.c...

(Inspired by https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9303351 )

I always heard "Tabs for indenting, spaces for aligning."

These days just use expand tab, in an age of online code review tools etc it's just better not to have to configure every system to interpret tabs to your given number of spaces - just write the damn spaces into the file.

> "it's just better not to have to configure every system to interpret tabs to your given number of spaces"

The entire point of "tabs to indent; spaces to align" is that you don't need to make sure everyone displays tabs the same way. If we are using that scheme and I have mine set to 4 spaces but you have yours set to 8, everything is fine. There is no problem there.

That works but takes a lot of discipline. More than any team I ever worked with had.

In my experience, the difficult part is getting people to understand it.

Yeah, but since every time someone new comes along who doesn't understand what this means (witness the replies you're getting)... no tabs. It's just easier this way.

Mix tabs and spaces in code and you're in for a fun time :D

You think that's bad:

https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/neo/game/ai/AI.h...

Scroll down and watch the readability disappear.

Does this fix it? https://github.com/dhewm/dhewm3/blob/master/neo/game/ai/AI.h...

append ?ts=4 to the URL to change GitHubs default 8 character tab to 4 characters wide.

Is that really a GitHub thing? When I view diffs in the command line with Git, it always shows tabs as 8 spaces too.

8 spaces tends to be the de facto standard tab width. But because tab is it's own ASCII character (0x09), much like how space (0x20) and the lower case letter 'a' (0x61) are, it means it's up to whatever text processors used (eg diff, vim, GitHub web application, etc) to interpret a tab character by whatever width they choose. Which is why tab spaces are a per-application setting, eg:

    diff --tabsize=4 ...
    vim "+set tabstop=4" ...
    http://github.com/.../file?ts=4

Your comment has nothing to do with the article.. or even keeping things simple.

I think it's actually a point against lining up variable assignations like that more than a point for spaces (I prefer spaces over tabs btw).

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