Tabs work fine as long as you don't align stuff. If you do, you have to assume a tab size and mix tabs and spaces.

It's OK, I replace all the tabs with spaces for uniformity. Tabs are stupid and they mess things up when I paste stuff. I like to watch the world burn.

System.out.println("Wow, so little amount of characters to print this!");

And by using tabs the IDE can customise whether it's displayed as two character or four character deep indentation. It just makes so much more sense.

It's insane that anyone considered spaces to be a sensible default. Yet I primarily develop in C# where four spaces are the standard so that's what I use. However the reality is the IDE handles all the formatting automatically so I'm never actually typing four spaces

Well, the tab key was created to avoid repeatedly having to press space to create an indentation, but that was on typewritters, so either way, you can use spaces or tab key to indent text.

Now text editors can transform tab character ('\t') to desired amount of spaces, and I think the problem with using tab characters in code ('\t') is that system may have different configurations for the amount of space a tab char takes, making it look inconsistent on different systems, while space char is pretty much standard on every system.

I was pro tabs when I started out with software development. It just made sense, right? You press the key once, you get a single symbol, you have your indention, neat. And there is the argument that everyone can adjust their tab sizes, want it to be 2 spaces? 4? 6? Whatever? Awesome!

Then you write actual code and this perception changes. Tabs make a mess, developers often align both code and comments to make sense. That alignment only works at x-spaces and utterly breaks if you change tab width.

An example in C# with LINQ (just semi-random stuff):

var test = customers.Where(c => c.Deleted == false
                             && c.Enabled
                             && c.HasProducts()
                             && blockedCustomers.Contains(c.Id) == false);

This kind of indention only works with spaces, not with tabs. And no, mixing tabs and spaces doesn't work (like some users claim, that you can indent with tabs and then do alignment with spaces.. nope, if you change tab with then your space alignment breaks).

Honestly, I don't care either way, I just use what my company uses and adapt. But till now it has always been spaces (even though I was team tabs in university) and now I actually prefer spaces as it just makes sense. It's consistent, it's easy, it works everywhere.

Btw. the Lemmy code editor is shit, trying to align this was trial and error for a minute :-/

It goes on the line! If you put it below, you're wasting a line for no extra readability!

Totally agree, all my { end up on the next line, 1st spot when starting a function, last character of the keyword when starting an if/for/... section. I even put the closing one on the same line when it's single line, else either at the end of the closing line (when changing really old code) or same indent.

So indenting varies a lot, which makes most 'new' programmers go mental.

while (my code)
    { I'll do it my way }

if (! liked)
 { toughen-up }
else
 { get used to it
   multi-line can go both ways...
 }

That is, unless the font used messes it up. ;)

That's cause they pay us by the byte the suckers.

Imagine not using a minifier

The indentation always looks the way you wrote it even in raw text viewers, is generally the argument.

Wait. Are tabs used more often in modern stuff? Almost everything I use does spaces and I'm not that new to programming. Been doing it for maybe 5 years. I use spaces in everything but Go.

the correct way is to never indent and never use whitespace. Saves memory.

Your goal should be 1LOC every month, no more.

So people who contribute to open source use spaces more.Thiss is probably because in a collaborative environment, you can't guarantee how tabs will look on all systems, and it may look horribly on some. An open source project is most likely to enforce a standard, and that standard kind of has to be spaces.

It makes me wonder what portion of the stack overflow survey is from people who aren't working on collaborative projects at work.