[ellard]

I have the same dissonance.

For me, I think it's from my underlying interest in being good at something without having to make compromises or handicaps. As a benign example, I rarely/almost never change the keybinds in any of the code editors that i've used because I like the idea of being able to competently use all of them in their default settings to have a consistent experience everywhere. This allows me to use another instance of VSCode/PyCharm/Eclipse/etc. that's not my own and be able to reasonably be productive in that instance. It's a little silly, but it's something that I like.

Tabs runs counter to that underlying interest to a very small degree. They're there to be customized, and there's an expectation that you are supposed to customize their appearance for each view that you use to view them if you want a consistent appearance.

To an extent, I view the debate between the two as something similar to the debate between configuration vs convention. Convention is great when you're working within the 99% of the use cases that it supports, but it becomes difficult for the folks who need to do something not supported by the built in conventions and vice versa. Some people like one, some people like the other as a matter of preference. However, there's a small subset of the population that basically need configuration for one reason or another to operate. Whether it's because you're building a product that needs a feature that the framework doesn't support to stay afloat, or in this case, they need to be able to customize the appearance of code on the screen easily to be able to perform their duties in a reasonable time. I don't know if this comparison makes sense or is reasonable.

I will say that i've ran into enough errors due to people entering tabs into places that they shouldn't that my hate for tabs has grown more than it should. This ranges from people somehow (via copy+paste or whatever) entering a tab into a form field that doesn't allow for it to other engineers doing something similar for code and causing weird issues.

Edit: formatting