Code can be viewed in more than just an editor. It might be in a terminal, rendered in a browser, etc. Sometimes you might even have to view it in an environment you don't control. I am very disinterested in configuring each and every tool to have sensible tabstops, if such a tool can even be configured.

[–] Traister101 5 points 9 months ago (7 children)

Then don't? The whole reason nearly all the spaces guys do 4 spaces is cause that's the nearly universal tab width. You won't like this but the same exact argument can be made for spaces yet I'd bet you haven't even once configured the width of those.

I don't actually change tab width, it's the default 4 spaces equivalent for me but just because I don't take advantage of the ability doesn't mean I should prevent others from doing so.

[–] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

The whole reason nearly all the spaces guys do 4 spaces is cause that's the nearly universal tab width.

That is provably wrong. The default tab width in vim is 8 spaces, and the default indentation in yaml is two spaces.

[–] Traister101 0 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

What's yaml have to do with anything? It's like python with syntactic whitespace which is unrelated to this discussion. The Tab vs Space debate is entirely around non syntactic whitespace which doesn't effect how the code is parsed. And yes Python technically does both tabs and spaces but it's all sorts of fucky.

Terminal editors while still used a ton aren't really what I was referring to. Newer terminal editors such as Helix have tab width configured per language most of which default to a width of 4 spaces but toml/yaml both default to 2 spaces. I was mainly referring to GUI editors as frankly that's just what most people use nowadays. JetBrains IDEs, Visual Studio, Eclipse, VS Code, Notepad++ were primarily what I was thinking of as I've used all of them and they all default to a tab width of 4 hence why I said nearly universal. Also I said nearly terminal editors being the only editors I've used that don't default to a width of 4 seems like a fair usage of the term.

[–] lemmyng@lemmy.ca 0 points 9 months ago

Now you're just shifting the goalpost.

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