What if those who’ve been defending the use of tabs over spaces realized they’re actually using soft tabs (spaces behind the scenes) after all? 🤔🤔🤔

spaces > tabs

Well I use the tab key but have the editor configured to inject spaces.

Together with smart indent it makes writing code that still look nice in any editor easy.

@Voxera and that's the proper way of doing things

Tabs for lexical block indent, spaces for alignment.

This is the true way.

Yeah, I just love it when an IDE puts in 4 spaces instead of my tab, so when I change my mind or made a mistake I now have to press backspace 4 times instead of once and from time to time when I accidentally miss one backspace the line is misaligned and I have to go back and fix it! Not a waste of time at all!

Seriously though, that's just a pet peeve of mine, otherwise soft tabs are great and preserve formatting. They are the only compromise between tab/space users that works and if the IDE is good It's seemless

@Hazarth I just use a code formatter to keep the same visuals throughout all projectfiles. Like black or yapf for Python, astyle or clang formatter for C++ and so on.

@Hazarth shift-tab, my friend, shift-tab.

@iiii pfft, what is this? A word processor? I want my single char tabs! Works great on vim or nano!

@Hazarth if it does a tab replacement then it is aware of an indentation concept and most probably has that binding.

@iiii ah well, if we want to talk seriously then Id have to say that it just sounds like tabs with extra steps... Which then begs the question, why would I want the extra steps? The only reason Im ok with soft-tabs is because for some reason It's forced by most IDEs by default and that made it into an industry standard, which means if I wanted tabs Id ruin the codebase...

However you can bet your ass Im using tabs wherever I can on my personal projects!

Imagine actually pressing the spacebar 2-4 times after writing a line of code 😂😂😂

There is no such thing as soft tab. There is tab the keyboard key and tab the character.

It's people that don't understand how a tab character works that think spaces > tabs. In fact that is how this whole tab key produces spaces bullshit was invented.

Using spaces for alignment is as stupid as embedding font or colour in the code. I for example hate 2 space indent width. If we used tab characters I could just set my editor to display 4.

Fucking spaced out motions.

@Demolishun I agree on the first part disagree on the second. Spaces are a waist of space as they require up to 4 times the about of bytes per indent.

As for the exchange part: The functionally is different it's the same reason we don't use <b> and <i> tags anymore they are visuals used in structure so it should be in css. The tab width is a visual that should not be present in the structure.