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Tabs are objectively better than spaces - gomakethings.com (gomakethings.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 19 points 2 years ago (3 children)

What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size? I haven't seen this since typewriters.

Some projects just use tabs as a compressed form of 8 spaces. But that is a sin. Use tab to mean "one indent level" and align with spaces if you need to. (the occasional ASCII art diagram)

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size?

    • Termux
    • SourceHut
    • “View page source” in the browser
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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Termux

    I think running tabs -N (where N is you preferred tab size) in the terminal should work. This is what I use in my zshrc on desktop.

    SourceHut

    Yup, they seem to be pretty opinionated here. If you look at the source there is just an inlined style with a single rule pre { tab-size: 8 }. I guess that is what you get when you use opinionated tools. The user's browser isn't right, my preference is right!

    “View page source” in the browser

    On Firefox this uses my default tab size of 4. But I guess changing this default isn't user-friendly.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can't count it as good when it is unconfigurable when it happens to use your preference when the whole selling point of tabs is that they're configurable.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    I don't understand what you are trying to say. I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn't good. The other two are configurable and I have configured them to my preference on my machines.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    You made it sound like Firefox wasn't configurable, my bad. I thought you were saying you didn't care that it wasn't configurable because you liked the width they chose.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago

    I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn't good.

    I don't think this is a fair point. Every developer makes "opinionated" decisions on default settings on a daily basis. SourceHut is open source and anyone can propose a patch that makes the tab width configurable, which to my knowledge has not happened. "Forcing their preferences" would imo imply that this discussion happened and the patch was rejected without good reason.

    To me, this sounds a lot like the usual "I don't like the how this thing that you provide for me for free is doing this one thing so I demand you change it for me free of charge" argument.

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