In fact, they did better in the 19th century! tabs may be in single page for different purpose, tabs play automatic good role in mobile responsive desing. Well, Notepad here symbolizes the most basic of the text editors. Ever hear of NASA's Orbiting Carbon Observatory, … It’s deeply personal, and we’re all neatly lined up and can be scanned at a glance. It’s the 21st century! So you might still argue “I would use spaces because my editor automatically takes care of indentations for me”. So, why do I prefer tabs over spaces? Yes, keeping param_a in a separate line could have been done using spaces as well but the point here is that because people use spaces for indentation, they are following a horrific code style like the first example. I am a freelance developer currently working at Toptal and Udacity. You might think some of them as BS but they are rational and you can’t disagree with that. cancelLink is a different number of characters to cancelButton we need to change not only the “A tab could be a different number of columns depending on your environment, but a space is always one column.” “Tabs,” reads the counter argument. ... only if your team has settled The One Holy War of tabs vs spaces and/or has a uniform tab width setting. Why? If this article triggered a change in your coding habit, do let me know in the comments. Now, there might be a need where you have to quickly edit a code file. I’m here to talk about why I believe space is ultimately better than tabs, one word — consistency. It was a Wednesday. are more productive, why type 4 spaces when ye can hit 1 tab. No, I’m not here to talk about how developers who uses space makes more money. The spaces do not have any significant advantage over the tabs, they are totally better than spaces! line of code, and developers had to standardize on one single font that must be used by every developer on a code base. 1. 2016-05-26 / development • personal / 2 min read Why Tabs Are Better Than Spaces. Even for aligning parameters and comments, tabs … used in the industry. And then we can configure our IDE of choice, be it IntelliJ or VSCode or vi(m) or Emacs. PS - It may feel like I am being picky here but hey, tabs = spaces has been established so every pro for Tabs matters. They both get to view the code in the way that is easiest for them to read. Tabs vs spaces is an artifact of trying to render code into a monospace grid of characters. Why were ‘Tabs’ created when we already had spaces? This is not totally correct. “They’re a character specifically meant for indentation. In the aligned example every single line of code needs to change, since Yes, I have seen code examples like this in the wild. line where cancelButton occurs, but also every other line that aligns with it. sgarcia_dev 4 … As you can cutomize tabs but not spaces . They say, spaces make indentation look more consistent across different setups. And they take less space. Hell, we’re all smart guys, we can read code regardless of white-space agreements, as long as there are agreements. Give Avi Aryan a like if it's helpful. And there is no argument more evergreen than the timeless debate between tabs and spaces. On defaultly-configured Unix systems, and on ancient dumb terminals and teletypes, the tradition has been for the TAB character to mean move to the right until the current column is a multiple of 8. Even when writing a plain text document, the tab has a different purpose than the space. They are valid points, but the time concern raised is irrelevant and super ugly, well, is just opinionated. I don’t think reading it is enough, though, it’s a really deep issue. Tabs carry more semantic information than spaces. As programmers we sometimes want to align parts of our code. Having only one way is better than having two ways. First, let’s look at a common usage of alignment, along with its indented counterpart: I think we can all agree that the aligned version looks nicer. Ok, fine. At this point, we can say that spaces are pretty much equal to tabs if you don’t consider that indentation example earlier. Today I would like to discuss why tabs are better than spaces. Using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment could work, but is troublesome because you will … I am sure you have encountered this dilemma in your coding career time and again. Having an option is always better than having none. Hence my conclusion that aligning is a bad thing, given the version control tools that are commonly many communities that have standardized around 2 spaces, but it’s far from uncommon to see 4 spaces, take less time to go through. I have been programming for 6 years and I believe in code sanity as much as anything. We did ask-and here's what Abel Wang had to say. Indentation using tabs is flexible in its own way. Here's why: Yes, you can freely intermix tabs and spaces, and high-quality editors like EMACS handle it perfectly. Again, this is a very rare situation but because tabs = spaces has been established after point 2, this adds weight to the tabs category. Now tabs were introduced for indentation because indenting using space required lots of keystrokes (though it’s not the case with modern editors now). Sometimes code gets displayed outside of a programmer's editor. If both use spaces to indent, the aspect of the code will be the same for both. On defaultly-configured Unix systems, and on ancient dumb terminals and teletypes, the tradition has been for the TAB character to mean move to the right until the current column is a multiple of 8. could potentially be modified to display our code in a neatly aligned format on the screen, but take less size than multiple spaces. Tabs and spaces are both fine for indentation. Now that’s something worth fighting for! It was a Wednesday. take more space than a space. Tabs are meant for Indentation. since each change occurs on a different line of code. Programmers see the source differently. As an aside, I didn’t mention the extra grunt work involved in manually updating alignment when / Writes digitally much more than by pen // Double-spaces by habit and by preference /// Triple slashies by tradition CSS can though, quite easily. The Hubble Space Telescope has been a shining example of the advantage of having telescopes in space for two decades. madman who hates beauty? Albeit a space guy myself, I think much more important battle is consistency, and not a file level consistency or a project level consistency, an organizational consistency. Anyone can set them up how they like them, if it sucks in the browser, get the browser to fix them, dont change it for them. This one should be obvious. As you have noted, tabs are not for alignment. Let’s look into these in detail. These editors don’t convert a tab press to 4 spaces. better off if individuals are able to customize it to their liking. This means that each one will be comfortable with the code that uses his/her indentation width and will find annoying the other style. Before I present my argument for using hard tabs in code, it’s really important that I make another Yes, obviously the real numbers for the industry would be different than this. You might be saying, who uses “Notepad”? changing code. They allow developers with different preferences in indentation size to change how the code looks without changing the code” So there! automatically realign code as needed to follow your code style. So if you hate high indentation, you can set tab width as 2. Case in point: Converting from tabs to spaces is easy but going back the other way is hard (information is lost). The catch comes in when we start working with version control, as most developers will (and should). Tabs v/s Spaces: An analysis on why tabs are better 1. The only pro-Space argument I see is the very first code example in this article. As I already told at the start of this article, tab width can easily be changed in the editor to make indentation look consistent across different setups. i've been slightly dismayed, that in every tabs-vs-spaces debate i can find on the web, nobody is talking about the accessibility consequences for the visually impaired. It is considered a single character that is just wider than others. Tabs v/s Spaces. First, I would like to point out the major argument why people prefer Spaces over Tabs. a merge conflict that needs to be manually resolved, costing developer time and energy, and creating If you try to see the difference here, you will notice that double f is slightly misaligned in the second function. I have tried to put together all points I have on tabs v/s spaces and I came to the decision that tabs are clearly better. Tab-based indentation is uniform, like spaces. The TAB character takes X times (X being the number of spaces you would use) less space on the disk. Here's why. However, IMHO there are a few minor reasons to favour spaces over tabs: Different tools. Always. or even 3 spaces being used. If one were to rename the cancelButton variable in the example above to cancelLink, what changes Fewer Key Strokes. But for me, that doesn’t win against the stronger reasons we have for using tabs. — Compared to that, the problems mentioned in this article are irrelevant, and anyway very rare. Now, in a complex program indents can easily go up to 5 levels. There’s a lot more interesting battles to be held, such as adding nano to your Docker container because you lost your Vim commands A4 taped next to your computer only to see it reversed with a commit message such as “Real engineers use vi”. I hope this article will get programmers aware of why they should use tabs or spaces, whatever they feel like. I can have editor that does autowhitespace on screen, and process minified code in the background. If you want to speed up the process, read jwz’ rant. subjective a choice as you can find. Each location of the token $st gets replaced by either 16 spaces or 4 tabs, with the assumption that when you create tabs you want them to represent 4 spaces. Please spend 5 minutes on this article and then make a decision. And that’s how one can easily tell an experienced programmer from a novice, they don’t struggle with their text editing duties. To hear more opinions on this, check out our Channel 9 show - Tabs vs Spaces: https://msft.it/6014TxOyr Now that we’re not trying to make things line up, this becomes: “Tabs can be a different width in different editors”. Only indentation should be used to arrange code horizontally. Because since at least Visual Studio 2005, the default for tabs/spaces has been: Insert spaces, not “Keep tabs”. 2. The one real reason to use tabs over spaces In his post, Chase explains his own experience of using spaces at his workplace, and the negative effects it had on co-workers with visual impairment. Recently on Twitter there was a conversation about tabs vs. spaces in T-SQL code. So why then am I arguing against it? I named the procedures *Spaces and *Char9s instead of *Spaces and *Tabs so that the object names themselves would have the same length. As long as it asserts. That's why my preference is to use tabs to indent, then spaces to align after the indent; best of both worlds. When a custom tab is added to a channel, a Tab conversation is created that allows team members to have focused discussions about the content. – Roman Starkov Feb 28 '12 at 16:37. Spaces are slightly more popular as well. It does occur to me that our editors 6) In a file with TAB, one can know which character is used for indentation and which one for spacing. Programmers who prefer to indent with spaces, on the other hand, would've used 4 spaces to get the above code per indent level, with the if block indented by 8 spaces (two indent levels deep). I know this happens in a very rare case but let’s face it, we all have faced these situations many times in our career. rename, while in a different branch, another developer renames the doCancel variable to Tabs are the democratic way to handle white space. Luca Sommacal. Develop custom tabs In addition to the built-in tabs, you can design and develop your own tabs to integrate to Teams or share with the rest of the community. I know that you want to give comments to parameters and that’s why you are putting one parameter at a line but why this high degree of indentation. Also if you have a feedback about the article or would like to add to it, just throw in a comment. It’s quite simple: there are a huge number of advantages and very, very few reasons to use spaces — namely to work with teams that are stuck in their ways. 8. If you're stuck writing code where there's a question about tabs/spaces, I'd always run with python -t, maybe even python -tt – mgilson May 1 '14 at 19:57 It would suck, and we’d all be right to demand better. As I already told at the start of this article, tab width … All the chained method calls are You never have to worry about a launch failure. But the tabs part … If the code had been indented through tabs, well .. things could have been much faster and less frustrating. We can do better than our dad’s 1970s terminal. Cormee: ItachiNai: So because HTML can't support double-spacing after a period in a way that's easy for bloggers to write, this is an argument that has escalated to "apparently necessary waste of time" to address. PEP8 suggesting that you use spaces rather than tabs should save developers from struggling with inconsistent indentation ;-). Suppose average indent in a program is 3 levels and average code length (without indents) in a line is 50 chars and total lines is 100, then the file size we have with space indentation is 100 * (50 + 3*4) = 6200. Even if we are getting a saving on 10% in the code size, don’t you think it’s beneficial. would that involve? Imagine that one developer performs this Vertical alignment of code, comments, and syntax within a block can be done with spaces. Sure, you can right-click a tab to pin it to your browser, dump your tabs into bookmarks, or open multiple browser windows to organize disparate clusters of tabs. Space. But how much less can it be, 15%, 12%, 10%? 138 I’m aware of Some may prefer tab size 2. Why were ‘Tabs’ created when we already had spaces? No worries, one day you’ll understand why spaces work better when you’re working with other people, and then you’ll switch and be a better colleague, and ultimately earn more. Now let’s see, why tabs are better than spaces. As soon as you establish that aligning code is not a good idea, the chief argument for spaces melts away: “Tabs can be a different width in different editors, and we can’t guarantee that things line up”. familiar with, and how your brain processes visual information. It may be an obscure argument among programmers about how to format code – but it's also an age-old battle that still burns hot in development circles ("Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War" was published in 2000). pineapples involves a diff that touches many lines of code instead of just one. Of course I’d like to believe it’s true — I mean that article has graphs and everything! Some may prefer 8. But, spaces do have a real advantage and it comes when you are trying to do non-uniform indentation like of function parameters in a function declaration. Imagine the conflict and strife that would be created if choice of editor font was embedded into every The correct amount to indent your code depends on your screen size, font choice, what you’re The first function in this code uses spaces whereas the next one uses tabs. n % 4 != 0) in the indentation. With the non-aligned version, the VCS can automatically merge these changes, I am always ready to have a discussion on this topic on Twitter. I expertise in full stack web development. Spaces have no option to change size, thus making this actually a con of spaces. Althogh they have talked a lot about this topic, I have no ideas why these two styles have to fight. Am I a crazed Spaces or tabs? Whether it asserts \t vs four spaces, feel free to pick. Tabs and spaces are redundant ways of indenting source code. For me, this is not bothersome and I would gladly accept this over the benefits of tabs. Here's why. However, because of this, different environments and machines will display this character differently which means your code will look different to different people. Full Stack Web Developer at Toptal, GSoC 17 & Udacity Mentor. Programmers who prefer to use tab characters to indent their code would write the code using tab symbols for each level of indentation (two tabs for the inside of that if statement). The poll and answers are always hilarious though. Gotcha. And this comes at absolutely no cost. Pressing the tab key on the keyboard is only one keystroke. Quite understandably, for some people it might look like the visual end result is the same, but it’s not. Those libraries, they are pretty good at compressing white-space, regardless of the school of indentation you are from …. the opportunity for mistakes that could cause bugs. Gotcha. First let me preface this by saying that I have been a professional programmer for about 10 years now and have been dabbling in programming for almost 20 years now (since I was really young). Tabs can be configured to consume any number of columns in the editor. Why? Why Are Spaces Better Than Tabs? Follow me on twitter. For indentation right, what other could be the reason. Why Tabs Are Better Than Spaces. Cormee: ItachiNai: So because HTML can't support double-spacing after a period in a way that's easy for bloggers to write, this is an argument that has escalated to "apparently necessary waste of time" to address. Storage can get quite expensive with … Just put a static code analysis tool in front of your pushes, and make it strict. To fix this, you will have to add some tab spaces for the indentation blocks (n / 4) + (n % 4) spaces for the extra. The Hubble Space Telescope has been a shining example of the advantage of having telescopes in space for two decades. then to save it in a simpler unaligned format when written to disk, giving us the best of both worlds. cancelHandler. The horizontal tab list on the top of your browser just isn’t made to handle a ton of tabbage. to imagine that the number of spaces argument should be any less controversial. Sounds like a pretty sweet feature to me. Italian developer (mainly in C for embedded platforms), Linux learner, addicted to rock music, history, science and few other things. Tab-based indentation is uniform, like spaces. Here is the code I … 1. A better example using tabs would be -. Why would I say this? If tabs were supposed to win, they would have won the default settings battle. But if they both use tabs instead of spaces, the code automagically adapts itself depending on … Eg. Advantages of Tabs Over Spaces. That’s all for now. If the code has been indented by spaces and you are trying to add a few lines in the code, you will have to use 4 times spaces for each level of indentation. As I already told at the start of this article, tab width can easily... 3. With tab indentation, total file size is 100 * (50 + 3) = 5300. If you think about how controversial the tabs vs. spaces argument can get, I don’t see any reason There are some people who prefer spaces instead. Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won 7 March, 2012. I learned EMACS in 1983 and freely intermixed tabs and spaces until LAST YEAR, when a young programmer explained to me the errors of my ways. Thanks for taking time reading this blabbering. Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won 7 March, 2012. In my opinion, it’s just the opposite. Suppose you are using a 4-space indentation, then the total size of the file added by your indent chars will be 4 times more than using tab indents. And Char9 represents the fact that a tab, in ASCII, is actually CHAR(9). I/we use soft tab represented as two spaces and our linter tells us if we're wrong. I don’t think there’s any good answer here, since it’s about as Now, for those who insist on tabs, let me explain why spaces are better: they allow you to align parameters and operators after the indent. Tabs have no other functionality in source code except indentation, and they are debatable for even that single use case. Spaces should be used where tabs are completely useless. I am only going to use rational points here. This won’t be the case with tabs as you will only have to add the tabs that were deleted. Get insights on scaling, management, and product development for founders and engineering managers. Why tabs are great. That’s because many editors can be configured to / Writes digitally much more than by pen // Double-spaces by habit and by preference /// Triple slashies by tradition CSS can though, quite easily. Read programming tutorials, share your knowledge, and become better developers together. Saving 17% of space is just not worth the effort in what we produce mostly these days, Perhaps worth mentioning is compression libraries - something you should apply when you really want to optimize that 17%. Spaces are essential because we need them for other things like separating words in source code. Some preferred tabs because it was less work to press tab once than space bar four times, and others argued that, with fewer characters, T-SQL code would perform better. While you’ve valid arguments around “time to fix indentation” and a bit more opinionated arguments such as “super ugly & inefficient”, I find both of them shallow. The benefits of using TAB for indenting are obvious: Horizontal whitespace is left as a display setting, configurable by the developer. i recently worked at a company that used tabs let me illustrate with a quick story, why i irrevocably turned from a spaces to tabs guy. This is a saving of 17%. One of his co-workers uses a tab-width of 1, to avoid huge indentations when using a large font-size. Sorry, forgot to mention, imho point 4 does not really apply nowadays. Hard tabs are the better solution. related argument first, so bear with me as you consider the following statement: Aligning code is bad practice, and should be avoided. By the way, this works way better as a discussion like this than a poll, because it's not always clear what people mean by the two answers. As soon as you establish that aligning code is not a good idea, the chief argument for spaces melts away: “Tabs can be a different width in different editors, and we can’t guarantee that things line up” Now that we’re not trying to make things line up, this becomes: “Tabs can be a different width in different editors” And there is no argument more evergreen than the timeless debate between tabs and spaces. Because since at least Visual Studio 2005, the default for tabs/spaces has been: Insert spaces, not “Keep tabs”. So these are my pro-Tabs reasons. As a bonus, tab width can be changed unlike spaces and this allows a developer who hates, say wide indentation to visualize a narrower indentation while coding. posted to a newsgroup or forum. They don’t say “make this move one character over”, they This might not be the case with everyone. simply say “indent this by one unit”, and the unit is up to you, the reader. The only reliable, repeatable, transportable way to ensure that indentation remains consistent across viewing environments is to indent you code using only spaces. We had a group meeting and changed our policy to eliminate tabs in our source code. Much the same story exists for another common use of aligning, aligning the values of a hash: Again, the aligned version looks nicer, but a simple change like adding a value for a new key “Spaces,” reads one argument. 5) it’s FASTER to tab than to 4-space. I prefer tabs. If tabs were supposed to win, they would have won the default settings battle. With the aligned version, this will create Let’s take a situation where you accidentally deleted some spaces (n s.t. For indentation right, what other... 2. Verdana does well on both points (better than most monospaced fonts, imo), which is why I use it – Rik Oct 20 '08 at 14:36. This creates bigger diffs that are more difficult to merge. I hope at this point of the article, I have cleared the air around tabs and why people feel that spaces are superior to tabs. Configuring tab size is not actually required, but optional. Altogether, 40.7 percent of respondents used tabs, while 41.8 percent used spaces (with 17.5 percent using both). not need to agree how many tabs to use: tabs is always one, spaces are usually 4, but some prefer 2 spaces. I’ll leave the former to people who really want to argue about that, and focus on the latter. In the Perl community Damian Conway pushed spaces over tabs for Perl source code in his book, Perl Best Practices. If I worked in a tab-driven language I'd use tabs. This is the main point why people thought spaces are better. Besides “you can configure your editor”, I fail to see an argumentation towards tabs, sorry, Avi. tend to work better in IDEs. But these primitive forms of tab organization are far from convenient or effective. Well have a look at the next points then. Enjoy this post? Spaces generally do better than tabs here - everywhere spaces would get mangled, tabs do as well, but not vice-versa.
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