Question Vote: Tabs or Spaces

(oh no)

 

Mind you there is a correct answer

 

The correct answer in this is what we can align on as a community, it's purely a preference and has no real impact on the final product

 

https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_talks_about_the_real_reason_to_use_tabs/

 

i dont understand the question

 

I'm fine with whatever people prefer, I don't use Notepad so I should be able to just setup my IDE to match the community's preference.

 

IDEs normally have tabs as the default option, I think.

 

I do prefer spaces, but aside from the visually impaired, are there other benefits to tabs that outweigh the negatives?

I'd really like to get some answers here as so many people seem to prefer tabs (honestly I thought everyone would prefer spaces)

 

Adding or removing one tab is quicker than 2+ spaces.

 

isn't any decent IDE (even vim) catching the TAB and inserting a predefined number of spaces? so speed is not an Issue

 

Inserting yes but not removing.

 

The problem with tabs, and it's a HUGE problem, is that many IDE's are set up to automatically expand tabs, so every commit (in github, at least) is going to create a largely irrelevant changelist.
,
YAML, which is the format of the .asset files, does not allow tabs. Even if the Unity parser does (not sure if that's the case).

Absolutely we should be using spaces for any .asset and .cs file, and we should agree on some style guide as to 2 or 4 or whatever number of spaces. But tabs are terribly problematic for a team effort, and shouldn't be allowed.

 

Why would every commit create a largely irrelevant change-list if the entire project is already setup to use tabs over spaces if we make that decision? At best there would be a set of commits at first that would do this in order to align the entire project to tabs over spaces but once that’s done there’s no more extra empty lines to be committed.

Tabs can also be changed to whatever size you want them in most IDEs so you yourself can decide whether you want a tab character to be 2 or 4 spaces in size without it impacting anyone else meaning that we don’t even have to align on how big the indentations should be.

I see more upsides than downsides to using tabs over spaces and the Reddit post that @Skjalg posted provided a very good argument to why we should use tabs over spaces.

 

CTRL + Backspace is the shortcut that solves even this problem, so speed really shouldn't be the deciding factor if we use tabs or spaces.

 

.editorconfig file overrides IDEs settings.

speed of clicking 1 button > speed of clicking 2 buttons

 

Yeah, it's the case for almost all code review tools.

 

Yes, tabs are normally used and they should be. It is easier to use tab once than using spaces four times.

 

Most IDEs support tabs inserting a configurable number of spaces.

 

Closing this thread as the decision has been made to go with Tabs instead of Spaces