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 in
Every single time I’ve tried to work on a file using tabs, I’ve had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I’ve yet to see it work well.
(For what it’s worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)
Every single time I’ve tried to work on a file using tabs, I’ve had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I’ve yet to see it work well.
(For what it’s worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)