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.
What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size? I haven’t seen this since typewriters.
Some projects just use tabs as a compressed form of 8 spaces. But that is a sin. Use tab to mean “one indent level” and align with spaces if you need to. (the occasional ASCII art diagram)
I think running tabs -N (where N is you preferred tab size) in the terminal should work. This is what I use in my zshrc on desktop.
SourceHut
Yup, they seem to be pretty opinionated here. If you look at the source there is just an inlined style with a single rule pre { tab-size: 8 }. I guess that is what you get when you use opinionated tools. The user’s browser isn’t right, my preference is right!
“View page source” in the browser
On Firefox this uses my default tab size of 4. But I guess changing this default isn’t user-friendly.
You can’t count it as good when it is unconfigurable when it happens to use your preference when the whole selling point of tabs is that they’re configurable.
I don’t understand what you are trying to say. I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn’t good. The other two are configurable and I have configured them to my preference on my machines.
You made it sound like Firefox wasn’t configurable, my bad. I thought you were saying you didn’t care that it wasn’t configurable because you liked the width they chose.
I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn’t good.
I don’t think this is a fair point.
Every developer makes “opinionated” decisions on default settings on a daily basis. SourceHut is open source and anyone can propose a patch that makes the tab width configurable, which to my knowledge has not happened. “Forcing their preferences” would imo imply that this discussion happened and the patch was rejected without good reason.
To me, this sounds a lot like the usual “I don’t like the how this thing that you provide for me for free is doing this one thing so I demand you change it for me free of charge” argument.
What environment are you using that has a hardcoded tab size? I haven’t seen this since typewriters.
Some projects just use tabs as a compressed form of 8 spaces. But that is a sin. Use tab to mean “one indent level” and align with spaces if you need to. (the occasional ASCII art diagram)
I think running
tabs -N(whereNis you preferred tab size) in the terminal should work. This is what I use in my zshrc on desktop.Yup, they seem to be pretty opinionated here. If you look at the source there is just an inlined style with a single rule
pre { tab-size: 8 }. I guess that is what you get when you use opinionated tools. The user’s browser isn’t right, my preference is right!On Firefox this uses my default tab size of 4. But I guess changing this default isn’t user-friendly.
You can’t count it as good when it is unconfigurable when it happens to use your preference when the whole selling point of tabs is that they’re configurable.
I don’t understand what you are trying to say. I agree that SourceHut forcing their preference isn’t good. The other two are configurable and I have configured them to my preference on my machines.
You made it sound like Firefox wasn’t configurable, my bad. I thought you were saying you didn’t care that it wasn’t configurable because you liked the width they chose.
Oh no. It is configurable, although it requires editing
userContent.css. So barely configurable. I think it defaults to 8 but I reduce it to 4.I don’t think this is a fair point. Every developer makes “opinionated” decisions on default settings on a daily basis. SourceHut is open source and anyone can propose a patch that makes the tab width configurable, which to my knowledge has not happened. “Forcing their preferences” would imo imply that this discussion happened and the patch was rejected without good reason.
To me, this sounds a lot like the usual “I don’t like the how this thing that you provide for me for free is doing this one thing so I demand you change it for me free of charge” argument.
Microsoft Windows’ Notepad. I have sometimes used that when on a public computer.
Github uses 8 as a default. It’s configurable though.