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 in
  • ColloidalEnglish
    19·
    3 days 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
      3·
      2 days 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
          1·
          2 days 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.

    • pohart
      11·
      3 days ago

      I don’t understand even a little how spaces won.

      • FizzyOrange
        42·
        2 days 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!

        • BatmanAoD
          2·
          2 days ago

          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.)

      • ulternoEnglish
        2·
        2 days ago

        It was because people wanted alignment on top of indentation, which would mean, you would be using tabs+spaces, making it ugly.

        I am in no-alignment btw

        • pohart
          3·
          2 days ago

          Alignment should be handled by the editor, if the user wants it