Converting a Git repo from tabs to spaces
eev.ee
This post is about the thing in the title. I used to work for Yelp. For historical reasons — probably “the initial developers preferred it” — their mostly-Python codebase had always been indented with tabs. That’s in stark contrast to the vast majority of the Python ecosystem, which generally uses the standard library’s style guide recommendation of four spaces. The presence of tabs caused occasional minor headaches and grumbles
  • Colloidal@programming.devEnglish
    1·
    4 months ago

    It makes me sad we didn’t collectively agree on using tabs for all indentation so people can set their preferred indentation size in their editors.

    That said, consistency trumps philosophy.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        1·
        3 months ago

        IMO it’s because open source developers commonly use editors that have poor support for tabs, like Vim and Emacs.

        Tabs are definitely better but to use them properly you do really need a “visualise whitespace” option enables. Emacs does it like this and Vim like this. Both awful.

        Possibly also a bit because tabs for indentation, alignment for spaces is just too complex for most developers. Hell most can barely even get spaces right. I work in a couple of languages without an autoformatter (e.g. SystemVerilog) and some of our files are a joke. A mixture of 2 and 3 space indentations, sometimes on the same line!

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      0·
      3 months ago

      That said, consistency trumps philosophy.

      If only we had collectively agreed on a number of spaces! Sadly it seems split fairly evenly between 2 and 4 so we don’t even get consistency.

        • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
          1·
          3 months ago

          I mean, you can use tabs consistently within a project. The only thing I’m aware of that actually bans tabs is YAML and… well, you can go a long way by always doing the opposite of what YAML does.