From: harryh	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:11 am (UTC)		(Link)

OMG, anyone who answers tabs is so unbelievably wrong I can't even contemplate it. Anyone that works on a team knows that tabs lead to unimaginable ugliness. Ugh. I can't even thing about this without getting annoyed at people that put tabs in source code. So hideous.

	From: feignedapathy	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:24 am (UTC)		(Link)

A team that standardizes is a team that avoids ugliness.

	From: harryh	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:36 am (UTC)		(Link)

Any team of sufficient size will end up using different tools to edit the same code. These tools will interpret tabs differently. A space is always a space.

	From: feignedapathy	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:41 am (UTC)		(Link)

It's true that everyone uses different tools, however, every editor I've ever seen even worth its salt has the ability to set tab width, most on a per-file or per-project basis.

	From: nbarkas	Date: September 19th, 2007 11:24 pm (UTC)		(Link)

It's not an editor, but cat doesn't. Pretty sure more doesn't either. less does, but I don't want to bother giving options to less or distribute a .lessrc to every machine I ever use. These tools pretty much all display tab as 8 characters by default, and most source code I look at was not intended to be indented that way. They all display spaces the way the author intended, though.

If I can help it, the only time I use tabs is when editing Makefiles. And that is only because it is required due to obnoxious historical crap.

I can't believe tabs are winning this poll :(

	From: endquote	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:49 am (UTC)		(Link)

What editors do you use?

I don't really care if tabs or spaces are used, as long as I can hit backspace once to go back one level of indentation, and tab once to go forward one level.

This is coming up for me because I'm using Visual Studio for the first time, which defaults to spaces, and MS likes spaces, but their tool makes me type four spaces and backspace four spaces to in/undent, and that is lame. Maybe there's just some setting I'm missing.

	From: feignedapathy	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:58 am (UTC)		(Link)

At least the last time I used it, the tab key still put in the spaces in Visual Studio.

	From: endquote	Date: September 19th, 2007 02:25 am (UTC)		(Link)

It does, but backspace and arrows only go back one space, which is annoying.

	From: calmkelp	Date: September 19th, 2007 02:02 am (UTC)		(Link)

I'm with you on this. I've even pissed my self off recently by failing to set this correctly on some systems. Since vi(m) seems to actually insert tabs unless you tell it not to...

	From: langston	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:52 am (UTC)		(Link)

of course, I assume you're referring to paragraph spacing in Word.

	From: endquote	Date: September 19th, 2007 01:54 am (UTC)		(Link)

Nope, it's referring to whitespace in program code.

In Word you should probably define a style that does what you want.

	From: langston	Date: September 19th, 2007 02:00 am (UTC)		(Link)

in program code, which I haven't done in any capacity since college, I used the space as that is what was taught to me in Nerd 101.

	From: futileboy	Date: September 19th, 2007 02:16 am (UTC)		(Link)

I set up most of my editors to use the tab key, but translates it to 4 spaces.

	From: sixty4k	Date: September 20th, 2007 03:27 am (UTC)		(Link)

amen to the most correct solution.

	From: chris	Date: October 5th, 2007 10:23 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I should do that, but I don't. partly because code I edit is on a bunch of different hosts.

It does bug me when people use different editors and code I've inherited is now littered with inconsistent indentation, but I still use tab because I'm too lazy to be hitting the spacebar and backspace so many times.

	From: joshc	Date: September 19th, 2007 03:06 am (UTC)		(Link)
	"I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."

	From: nerdhaus	Date: September 19th, 2007 07:55 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: "I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."

ftw!

	From: joshc	Date: September 20th, 2007 10:26 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: "I don't understand the question and I won't respond to it."

re-finding that website of quotes made me so happy. I downloaded a bunch of them and just played them in a 1-minute loop over and over again.

	From: halalkitty	Date: September 19th, 2007 03:12 am (UTC)		(Link)

Great taste, low calorie!

	From: mysocalledmind	Date: September 19th, 2007 05:58 am (UTC)		(Link)

I program in either Assembly or Verilog (hardware definition language)

So screw tabs. It's too high level for me.

	From: lechatron	Date: September 19th, 2007 11:46 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Here is a video explaining why you should use spaces over tabs.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eBGIQ7ZuuiU