[jchw]

The knee-jerk reaction is almost certainly going to go along the lines of “But you can emulate all of those features with spaces anyways!”

Which is true. But what if my tools don’t all do that? What if doing so makes it harder to work for some reason or another? Users who use this tab emulation will experience all of the downsides that spaces are supposed to avoid, like misaligning justified comments. I think it’s a waste of effort.

All I can say is, I appreciate the Go team’s decision to use tabs. It makes semantic sense, it puts everyone on the same playing field, and it doesn’t require editor support. Even Windows 98 notepad can be used comfortably as a code editor for tabs-based code, if you for some reason wanted to do that. In reality that is not necessary or desired, but it illustrates that this is the path of least resistance.

That web browsers handle tabs poorly is of no concern to me. If it were really a huge problem, pretty much any editor in existence can do a Replace All to get back perfect spaces-indented code.

[runarberg]

I really don’t care about tabs vs. spaces anymore. I just go with what ever my auto formatter uses. But I do think we have been having the wrong argument all these years, and I think the proliferation of auto formatters are setting us straight, finally.

The issue is not tabs vs. spaces. It is block indentation vs. alignment. If you use alignment you are forced to use monospace fonts, if you use alignment with tabs, everyone is forced to set the same tab-stop (missing the point of tabs).

Block indentation on the other hand allows people to use whatever font they want (including non-monospace fonts) and what ever tab-stop they want. At that point it doesn’t matter anymore whether the indentation is done using tabs or spaces. The preferred font settings of the developers can deal with it.

[jasonhansel]

Exactly! Personally I find alignment (as opposed to block indentation) an annoying abuse of monospacing, especially when it's produced by overzealous code formatters.

[flukus]

> I just go with what ever my auto formatter uses.

Great on new code, but if you're doing this with older and messier codebases and not limiting the formatting to just your changes then you will ruin git/svn blame, at least places that don't ignore whitespace. If others are using the blame tool and frequently see your name then your coworkers might think less of you, even though it was just an auto formatter change.

[pvinis]

If the team agrees with the formatting, I don't think anyone would "think less of you" for applying it.

[kazinator]

> I just go with what ever my auto formatter uses.

Ah, so you're That Guy who messes up hundreds of irrelevant lines with whitespace changes along with their bug fix commit. :)

[Ygg2]

To be honest using non monospace font when coding should be be fireable offense.

I mean good luck with diffing that.

[dragonwriter]

> To be honest using non monospace font when coding should be be fireable offense.

Unless I'm coding with a wordprocessor that embeds my font choices and forces them on others, why should anyone else care, much less have cause to punish?

> I mean good luck with diffing that.

“Diffing” and “coding” are different code-related activity and aren't constrained to use the same font, so why would my choice of coding font have any effect on diffing?

[runarberg]

You right. Diff tools should use fixed width characters as diff operators (em-space, minus-sign, and plus sign are usually the same width in most fonts), but I doubt any diff tool does. It is a shame. The only reason we use monospace fonts as an industry is because that is how we’ve always done it, and now we are stuck there because we fail to think out side of the box (pun intended) when we make our tools.

[Retra]

Monospaced fonts are good for editing. Variable width characters are good for quick reading because they allow you to scan past spelling errors in prose. Monospaced fonts have distinctive 'textures' that make them amenable to detecting symbol identity. Variable width fonts intentionally eliminate that texture and are often optimized for ink density to 'grey out' blocks of text. Arrow keys don't work predictably in variable width text.

[runarberg]

There is no reason font designers can’t create variable width font faces that optimize character distinctions and important features while reading code. Many font faces even have settings that allow you to opt into making characters more distinguishable.

You are right about navigating between lines in a variable width fonts. However that is a problem with many text boxes on the web (including slack and github) and I don’t find it that much of a headache. I find it kind of rare that I need to navigate between subsequent lines and maintain the column except maybe at the start of the indentation level.

[Ygg2]

Not just diff tools. When you write your own code you are constantly diffing against other code. In essence monospace font prevents these kind of small errors.

[kazinator]

Merely downvoting your comment should be punishable by a six month revocation of internet access.

[a3n]

> If it were really a huge problem, pretty much any editor in existence can do a Replace All to get back perfect spaces-indented code.

Sometimes tabs or spaces are data, like in strings. Replace All is too blunt.

[jchw]

For displaying code on websites, it may be a necessary step even if it loses data. Still, at least for most of my personal use cases, it's fine - If I need a tab character in a string I almost always use a tab escape (like \t) anyways, the main exception being for code generation where it is fine if it changes anyways.

[diminoten]

Yeah but what if my tools don't all handle tabs well?

[burfog]

I happen to know an amazing developer who mostly uses notepad. Sometimes he will start Visual Studio for other reasons, and then might edit files that way, but typically he edits with notepad. Notepad is fast and simple.

[quickthrower2]

It has a horrible undo behaviour. I need a reasonable undo to work effectively. And by reasonable I mean pretty much any other editor in the world except notepad.

Also paste is suboptimal but that’s forgivable.

And finally open a file without /r characters for new lines and have fun!

[inflatableDodo]

When learning a new language, I tend to use a basic text editor and run the compiler directly on the command line until I can at least get things working in it. Then I might look at IDEs.