Keith Devens .com

More on tabs vs. spaces

So, at work I've just been using the default settings on Visual Studio to determine my brace style and indent style. To my surprise I've found the spaces vs. tabs issue far more important than having my code look "double spaced" with braces on their own lines. For one, ASP.NET doesn't get you very dense or detailed code anyway, so it doesn't matter as much that there are some extra blank lines spacing out the code. The thing that's annoyed me about having leading spaces instead of tabs is that it gets real old real fast having to hit the backspace key four times the number of times I'd have to hit it were I using tabs. Say I hit the tab key an extra time by accident... that's four times I have to hit the backspace key. In fact, that's an extra argument for using tabs I hadn't considered before. A one-to-one correspondence not only between the number of times you hit 'tab' and the number of characters put in the file, but between the number of times you hit 'tab' and the number of times you have to hit 'backspace' to remove that "tab".

Permalink | 8 Comments | Tags: Coding Style | id 7899

23:06 (utc-6)

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Yeah, I actually thought jEdit did just that, but I checked and it didn't. I just always use tabs.

Say you have three levels of indentation. That's 12 times I have to sit there and hit backspace. Ugh.

Keith, I thought you switched to Ubuntu? You're developing with Visual Studio? Anyway, I stick with tabs mainly because of that annoying backspace situation and try to leave in the header comment of my code how many spaces my tabs equal so that other people editing it can set their editors accordingly. Also, kudos on the Monster energy drink suggestion. Its all I drink now. Hope you're doing well in Tennessee.

Visual Studio at work, so it's not relevant what I use at home. Though, I happen to not be using Ubuntu at home either anymore since my main computer is now a laptop, and it's not exactly Linux friendly.

Doing pretty well in Tennesee, thanks man. Much better than I was when I was working for charlatans.

Sometimes shift-tab unindents. For really space unfriendly editors the workaround is to type in the closing brace before typing the inside of your block.

I mainly use delphi which has had "backspace unindents" forever.

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Tuesday, February 7, 2006

More on tabs vs. spaces

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