Tabs vs spaces is an artifact of trying to render code into a monospace grid of characters. David Robinson, the data scientist who performed this study found that programmers using space over tabs made an average of 9 percent more each year than their tab using counterparts. So I can see why tabs are preferred. The problem is that your file with tabs ADDED a tab to the existing blanks, it didn't replace a blank with a tab. This is the "2 vs 4 vs 3" space debate listed above. Which DB engine to use? My opinion toward spaces versus tab is a personal preference. Alignment is a way of making things visually line up and look pretty. I use tabs for curly brace languages. a lot easier (and more reliable) than search and … This changes the placement of some of the values and, since you are using an explicit format, the values are in the wrong columns. The main arguments for spaces is the consistency. Sometimes lines of Java code tend to get long, and the style guides set conventions on when is it appropriate to break or wrap. Tabs vs spaces. Brace on new or next line? Tabs are the most common problem, some code editors will treat each tab indent as very small, where as others will treat it like a huge block. Avoid “Tabs vs Spaces” Today, during code reviews, code formatting discussions never come up. However if it is a coding standard mandated whether it is spaces or tab by the company then I am fine with that as well. Tab vs Spaces is one of those religious wars, like the position of curly brackets (I use whatever is common on the language) or Vim vs Emacs (the solution for this last one is the Evil mode for Emacs, of course). This extension has an option which alerts a person when the file uses both tabs and spaces, and suggests to replace either tabs by spaces, or spaces by tabs. @Jubobs -- some editors have a function that replaces all tabs by the "correct" number of spaces; e.g., in emacs, it's "untabify". In the mind of a tab user, they should be used for indentation and spaces should be used for alignment. Some Precedents. When it comes to writing and editing TSQL, there are a lot of disagreements out there. 7 episodes Last episode: Feb 18, 2021 at 1:09AM Covering a broad range of developer-focused topics that may interest anyone using Windows as … And I’m not talking about: How to architecture your application? I think this post deserves a poll. Things like Ansible even fail if you use tabs. Hard tabs are tab characters. If a file contains tabs you can easily:se ts=4 or:se ts=2 to your preference.. Spaces encourage a lot bad code style where people line up symbols in random places on the line, which makes reading more difficult and can mess up version control. The infamous “tabs vs spaces” debate is as old as the internet itself. Spaces. Add a new line”? Nearly all editors allow configuring how they behave and what their width is. Whilst using tabs might work for a … Spaces debate was at an impasse once more, and to be frank, we grew despondent that such a meaningful question would ever be solved. But the decision about how to render them depends on who reads the code. In fact, they did better in the 19th century! Spaces don't work well for indents unless your whole team agrees on how many spaces an indent should be. TABs vs. Use micro-services or built a monolith? I like 4 space indentation, so 2 space indentation take a little adjustment, and 8 spaces would be just annoying. Some preferred tabs because it was less work to press tab once than space bar four times, and others argued that, with fewer characters, T-SQL code would perform better. 1. So the choice is really: "spaces only" vs "tabs and spaces". Things to remember in your TABS vs SPACES discussion: ADAPT if you work with a specific practices, coding language/framework, or editor (such as VIM) there may be additional pros and cons. There is no debate on tabs vs spaces or where to place parentheses, etc. Pro-spaces programmers argue that using the space bar makes the layout more flexible. We simply can’t “convert” everyone to one side or the other, there’s no question about it. Tabs versus spaces is not just a formatting issue. By far the biggest argument against using spaces (and I've seen it in *every* instance I've worked anywhere that uses spaces) is that people try to do it manually -- i.e., without having the editor automatically expand tabs. It’s the 21st century! Tabs don't work well for multi-line constructs, whether those are comments or long lines of code, because other editors or printers may interpret the tabs differently and screw up the alignment. This has been settled for years. there’s a clear preference for spaces over tabs in the style guides. Perhaps the classic holy war in computing is whether to use TABs in your source code. Why are you even talking about tabs vs spaces? A Glimpse: Spaces vs. Tabs Debate. Accessible first. Is there a Money Difference for Developers? Which is why spaces wins. Tabs vs. This is a question that is more debatable than a technical one like .NET Core VS. .NET framework. i've been slightly dismayed, that in every tabs-vs-spaces debate i can find on the web, nobody is talking about the accessibility consequences for the visually impaired. Well, now the Notepad++ actually always inserts tabs as spaces, even when the checkbox is unchecked. Tabs vs spaces There are some important decisions that you have to make at the beginning of the project. UPDATE #2: Last we talked, the great Tabs vs. Every { starts an indent level, draw a tab (or 4 spaces). It often occurs between groups of polarized developers violently defending their own side. Tabs vs spaces? Altogether, 40.7 percent of respondents used tabs, while 41.8 percent used spaces (with 17.5 percent using both). Tabs are descriptive - they tell the editor the amount of indentation that should be added. Most people don't really care anymore, and do whatever everyone else is doing (consistency in group projects is important). Recently on Twitter there was a conversation about tabs vs. spaces in T-SQL code. – Youda008 Mar 12 '20 at 10:28 | Show 1 more comments. Java Tabs vs Spaces – Analyzing popular code conventions (Source: outsideris/popularconvention) 2. Tabs work well with proportionally spaced fonts. For Python I follow PEP 8 and use 4 spaces. indentation: tabs vs spaces first, we need to get this off our chests before proceeding. Using spaces only has some advantages, but then people can't set their indention levels to whatever they want. These arguments are stupid and the solution is decoupling logic from presentation. These are things which can be applied to the code as it’s displayed in the editor: “see a brace? If you use tabs to indent, then every programmer can use their own preferred indent width. Let’s start at the beginning. The Argument for Spaces. TRUST your team to come up with the best Tabs vs Spaces solution. … The basic premise is that tabs allow people with impairments to modify the display to their needs. Which is right? I personally prefer spaces over tab but that is just me. The tabs advantages you mention are largely hypothetical / theoretical in nature, because there will inevitably be a mix of spaces AND tabs. One of the most used Visual Studio extensions is Productivity Power Tools. Spaces are slightly more popular as well. With spaces you do not have this translation problem, a space, is always just 1 space. ACT on the Delibr result and see positive progress.. Run this pre-populated discussion with your team! We can do better than our dad's 1970s terminal. 61. Tabs vs Spaces - Channel 9 In part 2 of Remote Development with Visual Studio Code , Brigit Murtaugh , a PM with VS Code, will explain how to set up a remote development environment using either Docker containers or GitHub Codespaces . – Milind R Jun 18 '17 at 9:38. by Ian Mallett. This seems to me a Argumentum ad populum: fallacious argument that concludes that a proposition is true because many or most people believe it. UPDATE #3: The great Tabs vs. And what a question it is - there has been reams of literature and debate on this very fine aspect of software engineering because it affects just about any endeavour that requires any form of code being manually written and stored. The analysis performed by the team at Stack Overflow found that programmers who use spaces instead of tabs are making more money. This leads to not all code indentation looking the same across multiple developers systems. Stay tuned to the Open Source Blog for the grand finale of this heated matchup. Problem. Default to tabs instead of spaces for an 'accessible first' environment The one real reason to use tabs over spaces. Indent Width. Precisely! Indentation can play a role in personal productivity. This has nothing to do with blanks vs. tabs, you'd get the same problem if you added a blank. The show gives non-coders a bit of context earlier in the episode, letting us know that the tabs-vs.-spaces is a largely trivial coding debate that Richard has neurotically strong opinions on. Spaces debate will take its final bow at SCaLE 18x March 5-8 in Pasadena, CA. Generally a single soft tab consists of multiple spaces. Tabs offer coders flexibility in how their code appears to them. 2. Line length, wrapping and breaks. However, pro-tabs users rebut saying tabs makes code more readable and aesthetically pleasing. Very passionate disagreements about whether we should have tabs, or whether tabs should all be replaced by spaces. What's the best way to format your code? The option is located at: Settings / Preferences / Language / Replace by space as in the Screenshot. Soft tabs are space characters. The first downside is that it quickly becomes a mess. That's completely portable across any environment. let me illustrate with a quick story, why i irrevocably turned from a spaces to tabs guy. Except that these actually have conceptual problems, while tabs vs spaces is a 100% stupid user problem. Tabs vs Spaces. To tab or not to tab, that is the question. In my Notepad++ 7.2.2, the Preferences section it's a bit different. Tabs can cause issues if one batch submits a program in SAS on a Windows machine that might … A tab is a single indent. In The Beginning. How are you going to deploy and scale your application? Spaces. In this video I discuss the topic of Tabs vs Spaces. Stack Overflow even made an analysis of their Developer Survey and determined that developers who use spaces earn more . If you like your code to use 4-space indents, you can just configure your text editor to show a tab as equivalent to 4 spaces. Indentation is a way of visually notating scope in your code.