In a new video, Microsoft’s principal cloud advocate and DevOps lead weighed in on that crucial and perennial developer question: which is better, indenting your code with spaces or with tabs?
“This is kind of a loaded question… However, I am very opinionated on this. I happen to be a huge fan of tabs, for a couple of reasons.
Number one, your file size is going to be much smaller, because a tab is just one character. Okay, okay, granted this isn’t a big deal any more, but I’m old as dirt, and I remember when hard drive space was at a premium.
But here’s the real reason: you can customize your indentation width. And this is actually a bigger deal than it sounds like. By using tabs, you now give each individual the ability to see the indentation widths that they want, or even in some cases need. That makes it so much more accessible than spaces, right?
So because of that, for accessibility reasons, use tabs.
Well, I guess that settles that, leaving no need for any further… Wait, there’s more responses from other Microsoft developers on this page, including program manager Craig Lowen. At the end of a video titled WSL2: Code faster on the Windows Subsystem for Linux! he says:
I prefer spaces to tabs, and that’s because tabs don’t actually have a denotation of how wide or short they have to be in indentations. That’s totally done by your IDE, so if you open it up in a different IDE, it might have a different level of indentation. If you use spaces, you’ll always have the same indentation level if you’re using a fixed-width font.
But however, I still use the tab key, and I just make my editor insert spaces for me.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot