Yesterday, I shared some spicy takes. A few were particularly controversial—most notably, that I correct Gif the correct way (with a soft G)—but I also got a lot of emails asking me to elaborate on a few of them.
Today, I wanted to talk about how tabs are objectively better than spaces. This won’t take long.
Tabs let you define how big you want each indent to be, and spaces do not.
Not personally, but I had a co-worker once who had an eye condition that made him extremely short sighted to the point where glasses could not fully correct it. He walked around in public using a stick for safety.
For his work, this meant he had to apply an extremely large front sizes. Since out code base was space indented, in nested places this would result in almost half his screen being blank on the left side because of the space taken to render blanks.
Sure, we could have just stood out ground and let him solve his own problems somehow. Instead, we made one change to the editorconfig, ran the formatter for a second, he set his tab width to 1 and the world was marginally better for him in less time than it takes me to tipe this text on my phone.
Do you have actual experience with it?
Some time ago I read a comment from someone with impaired eyesight who used an editor that would adjust space indent just fine.
Accessibility is a thing I always consider.
Not personally, but I had a co-worker once who had an eye condition that made him extremely short sighted to the point where glasses could not fully correct it. He walked around in public using a stick for safety.
For his work, this meant he had to apply an extremely large front sizes. Since out code base was space indented, in nested places this would result in almost half his screen being blank on the left side because of the space taken to render blanks.
Sure, we could have just stood out ground and let him solve his own problems somehow. Instead, we made one change to the editorconfig, ran the formatter for a second, he set his tab width to 1 and the world was marginally better for him in less time than it takes me to tipe this text on my phone.