this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Programming

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[–] potterman28wxcv@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Interesting take. I prefer spaces because each piece of code that I see with tabs has an implicit tabsize you really need to have if you don't want the code to look ugly - especially if the person has been mixing tabs and spaces - and they usually do. Sometimes unadvertently.

When you remove all tabs at least everyone is on the same page.

To the actual problem raised by the article:

I have ADHD. Two spaces per indent makes it damn near impossible for me to scan code. My brain gets too distracted by the visual noise. Someone who’s visually impaired might bump their font size up really large, and need to scale up or down the amount of space per indent. Someone might just prefer it because…

I wonder if it could be possible to adjust the "indent number of spaces you see" in code editors. Code editors are able to figure out what are indents and what are not, so in theory it should be possible. Perhaps that would be an idea for a new feature?

Yes. That's what tabs are for. You can choose the width of the tab. It can be small for people with small screens. It can be big for this guy or people with 600 inch ultrawides.

Tabs are objectively superior because they are exactly what everyone wants at all times, and the git commit history does not get polluted.

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