It makes me sad we didn't collectively agree on using tabs for all indentation so people can set their preferred indentation size in their editors.
That said, consistency trumps philosophy.
this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
8 points (68.2% liked)
Git
3236 readers
4 users here now
Git is a free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.
Resources
Rules
- Follow programming.dev rules
- Be excellent to each other, no hostility towards users for any reason
- No spam of tools/companies/advertisements. It’s OK to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the community should not be self-promotion.
Git Logo by Jason Long is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
That said, consistency trumps philosophy.
If only we had collectively agreed on a number of spaces! Sadly it seems split fairly evenly between 2 and 4 so we don't even get consistency.
Consistency within a project.
I mean, you can use tabs consistently within a project. The only thing I'm aware of that actually bans tabs is YAML and... well, you can go a long way by always doing the opposite of what YAML does.
I don't understand even a little how spaces won.
IMO it's because open source developers commonly use editors that have poor support for tabs, like Vim and Emacs.
Tabs are definitely better but to use them properly you do really need a "visualise whitespace" option enables. Emacs does it like this and Vim like this. Both awful.
Possibly also a bit because tabs for indentation, alignment for spaces is just too complex for most developers. Hell most can barely even get spaces right. I work in a couple of languages without an autoformatter (e.g. SystemVerilog) and some of our files are a joke. A mixture of 2 and 3 space indentations, sometimes on the same line!
Every single time I've tried to work on a file using tabs, I've had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I've yet to see it work well.
(For what it's worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)
It was because people wanted alignment on top of indentation, which would mean, you would be using tabs+spaces, making it ugly.
I am in no-alignment btw
Alignment should be handled by the editor, if the user wants it
Feels like a psyop, honestly