brewbuck

I use tabs at work. The reason is that some people like a larger visual indent and some people prefer a smaller one. By using tabs, you can adjust this by changing your editor's tab width.

For non-work, I indent with 4 spaces. I don't really have a strong feeling about it, but what I do hate are source files that have been mangled up with a mixture of tabs and spaces.

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Memloop

I like tabs and always keep my code 80 characters wide at most. Only one problem though: Let's say your company has a rule that code should not be more than 80 characters wide, and you start using tabs that are only 4 characters wide. What happens when someone who likes their tabs to be 8 characters wide opens your file and find that every other line soft wraps or disappears into the marginal?

Thantos

So true. I can use either tabs or spaces but it absolutely sucks when someone uses both.

I personally use tabs as it makes doing find/replace regex a lot easier, plus hitting the tab key is easier than hitting the space bar a bunch of times. Though with a good text editor you don't have to worry so much about that as it takes care of it for ya.

Sebastiani

Tell 'em to turn on line wrapping and deal with it.

Prelude

>It would allow us to see how everyone slowly trends from their
>imperfect indentation style, to the correct style of 4 spaces over time
Heheh.

>I was just wondering: how do you indent your source code?
I prefer two spaces, but any even number is comfortable. Odd numbers are unnatural.

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cyberfish

I use 8 spaces (set my editor to convert tabs to spaces). No particular reason.

Mario F.

This pool has become a revelation to me. I was pretty sure until now very few people used ASCII(9) for their code indenting. And I certainly haven't been seeing much of that when looking at code online or when copy pasting it to my editor from many different sources.

My guess... this pool is fixed!

tabs are evil.

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DavidP

I most definitely use ASCII(9), a.k.a. '\t'. It's the best way to go to keep things properly aligned, in my opinion. I hate it when I edit code that uses spaces and I have to backspace a million times to delete an indentation instead of simply backspacing once.

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laserlight

Depending on your editor and its configuration, you may only need to backspace once, or to use something like shift + tab.

Anyway, I note that this thread is about the amount by which one indents, not about whether one indents with space characters or tab characters.

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bithub

With vi, I use:
:set tabstop=4
:set shiftwidth=4
:set expandtab
:set softtabstop=4

With these settings, you don't even know you are using spaces instead of tabs. The tab key, delete key, and formatting behave exactly as you would expect. Plus you get the added benefit of consistent formatting since you are actually using spaces instead of tabs.

There is probably equivalent settings in other editors, but why would anyone ever want to use a different editor?

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Prelude

>I note that this thread is about the amount by which one indents, not
>about whether one indents with space characters or tab characters.
The amount is far more interesting. But I use real spaces because the amount is small enough that there's really no difference between tabbing once and spacing twice. If I used an indent of four or more spaces, I would be more inclined to switch to tabs.

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Memloop

I guess this situation should never happen since any company that has a policy that code should be at most 80 characters wide, will most likely also specify how long the indentation width should be.

Elysia

Me, I like tabs. Usually I think that 4 spaces is an ideal indentation level, and it is the default of Visual Studio, so that is what I use.

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laserlight

Aye, but I see that either I missed the ": spaces or tabs", or EVOEx has changed the topic.

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Sebastiani

So tabs are evil because of broken editors and programmer misuse? Ignoratio elenchi.