Comment by dbdr
20 hours ago
That's precisely the point of using tabs for indentation: you don't need to fight over it, because it's a local display preference that does not affect the source code at all, so everyone can just configure whatever they prefer locally without affecting other people.
The idea of "skins" is apparently to push that even further by abstracting the concrete syntax.
> you don't need to fight over it, because it's a local display preference
This has limits.
Files produced with tab=2 and others with tab=8, might have quite different result regarding nesting.
(pain is still on the menu)
I don't see why? Your window width will presumably be tailored to accommodate common scenarios in your preferred tab width.
More than that, in the general case for common C like languages things should almost never be nested more than a few levels deep. That's usually a sign of poorly designed and difficult to maintain code.
Lisps are a notable exception here, but due to limitations (arguably poor design) with how the most common editors handle lines that contain a mix of tabs and spaces you're pretty much forced to use only spaces when writing in that family of languages. If anything that language family serves as case in point - code written with an indentation width that isn't to one's preference becomes much more tedious to adapt due to alternating levels of alignment and indentation all being encoded as spaces (ie loss of information which automated tools could otherwise use).
I find it tends to be a structural thing, Tabs for indenting are fine, hell I prefer tabs for indenting. But use tabs for spacing and columnar layout and the format tends to break on tab width changes. Honestly not a huge deal but as such I tend to avoid tabs for layout work.
2 replies →
Do you mean that files produced with "wide" tabs might have hard newlines embedded more readily in longer lines? Or that maybe people writing with "narrow" tabs might be comfortable writing 6-deep if/else trees that wrap when somebody with their tabs set to wider opens the same file?