Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
Setting tabstop and shiftwidth differently is basically legacy braindead behaviour. It is going back to the logic of tab is just a way to compress spaces. If you are doing that then you have all of the problems of both tabs and spaces.
As for alignment the easy answer is don’t use tabs for alignment. Use tabs for indentation, if you want to align something use spaces for the alignment past the indentation. Lemmy seems to be breaking code snippets right now but I have a really old blog post about this.
The post is a little out of date when referencing the style of my blog but the C example shows alignment. If you can resize the browser you can see that the indention changes from 4 to 2 as the screen gets narrower without breaking the alignment.
Setting
tabstopandshiftwidthdifferently is basically legacy braindead behaviour. It is going back to the logic of tab is just a way to compress spaces. If you are doing that then you have all of the problems of both tabs and spaces.As for alignment the easy answer is don’t use tabs for alignment. Use tabs for indentation, if you want to align something use spaces for the alignment past the indentation. Lemmy seems to be breaking code snippets right now but I have a really old blog post about this.
https://kevincox.ca/2014/06/26/responsive-tabs/
The post is a little out of date when referencing the style of my blog but the C example shows alignment. If you can resize the browser you can see that the indention changes from 4 to 2 as the screen gets narrower without breaking the alignment.