By default, a tab in Microsoft Word is set to be the equivalent of four spaces.
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How many spaces is a tab key?
Modern usage – In word processing and text editing, the Tab key will move the insertion point to the next tab stop in a table, insert the ASCII tab character, or insert multiple space characters (depending on the program used). When filling out a computerized form, pressing Tab will sometimes move the cursor to the next field (and Shift-Tab will move the cursor to the previous field), eliminating the need to use a mouse to click in an adjacent field.
In many graphical applications, especially on Windows, the Tab key will move the focus to every control or widget such as buttons so that the user interface can be used without a mouse at all (this was part of the IBM Common User Access design). On macOS, this is an option called “Full Keyboard Access”.
A feature called tab completion can be used to complete a partially typed piece of text. For example, in some command-line interfaces, you may type the first few characters of a command or file-name, then press Tab. If there is no ambiguity about your intent, the rest of the characters will appear automatically.
- On some systems, even if your input is ambiguous, tab completion may give you a list of possible options to select from.
- Tab completion is more common on Linux, Unix, and Unix-like systems than Windows,
- In PC video games, the Tab key is very often used to show scores in multiplayer games.
- For single player games it is also used to show the world map or the player’s inventory, as well as other useful info.
In software engineering, when developing computer programs or storing and manipulating data in files, the Tab character is often used for indentation purposes to help guide the flow of reading and add semantic structure to the code or data. Some programmers and programming languages prefer the usage of multiple whitespace characters instead for that purpose.
Is tab equal to 4 spaces?
Answer – In most code editors, tabs are not the same as 2 spaces or 4 spaces by default. A tab is stored differently than spaces in the code. Tabs can be seen as a big “jump” in the text, while spaces are always 1 space each. When you move your cursor in the code, you may notice this “jump” when going through tabs as opposed to spaces.
- I have experimented couple of indentation combination in below mentioned code
- def about_this_computer(): print(“This computer is running on version Everest Puma”)
- print(“This is your desktop”)
- about_this_computer()
- Case 1) If two spaces are used before both the print statement then result is fine Case 2) If one tab is used before both the print statement then again result is ok
- Case 3) If one tab is used for one print statement and 2 spaces are used to another print statement then result is throwing error.
- This clearly means either you can use 2 spaces or one tab.
- In short only consistency of indentation is important whether you use tab or space.
17 Likes I’m late to the topic, but I’ve found that, with this particular compiler, either two spaces or a tab work and that you can mix and match the two.4 Likes from PEP INDEX 8 ‘
How much space is a tab in Word?
To indent using the Tab key: – A quick way to indent is to use the Tab key. This will create a first-line indent of 1/2 inch,
- Place the insertion point at the very beginning of the paragraph you want to indent.
- Press the Tab key. On the Ruler, you should see the first-line indent marker move to the right by 1/2 inch,
- The first line of the paragraph will be indented.
If you can’t see the Ruler, select the View tab, then click the checkbox next to the Ruler,
Is a tab 7 spaces?
However, realize that a tab can be set to any value, which means a tab could also be two, three, four, six, or seven spaces. A tab is only one character.
Is a tab 4 spaces or 2 spaces?
Are there practical or technical advantages to using 2-space vs 4-space indents? There are no clear “technical” advantages one way or the other. Indeed the only “technical” issue I can think of is the impact on the number of bytes in a source file.
If you represent the indents using space characters (ASCII SP), then 2 spaces is 2 characters fewer than 4 spaces. If you allow TAB characters to be used, then (on Windows) a TAB indents by up to 4 spaces, so TAB characters result in fewer characters. But the flip side is that a TAB conventionally indents by up to 8 spaces on many other operating systems, so if you want your source code to look nice on all platforms you shouldn’t use TAB for indentation.
And besides, it is common practice to “minify” CSS, Javascript and web-associated languages to make websites “faster”. Among other things, that will strip out the indentation, rendering this minor technical difference to be moot. (For the human readable version of a CSS, the saving in transmission time / storage space is too trivial to worry about.
Today’s systems are optimized for the mass market, where storing and moving around gigabyte-sized files (movies) is common-place. Source code pales into insignificance.) As to “practical” advantages, I guess it may be easier to view and edit files if you don’t waste too much screen real-estate with deep indentation.
From that perspective 2 character indentation is better than 4 or 8 character indentation. However this borders on being a “personal taste” issue, unless:
you have to use a device that can only display (say) 80 columns, or you have to work with code-style rules that restrict you to 80 columns.
Are there widely accepted conventions? In general no. In some languages, maybe, but I can’t think of any. Even in Java, the most common convention for indentation is 4 spaces, but others are acceptable. : Are there practical or technical advantages to using 2-space vs 4-space indents?
Are tabs 8 spaces?
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| That’s all well and good for Linux-style C programming maybe, but it would be painful in languages like C#. EG the simplest function in a Unity game, that prints “hello world” for the player only would be something like: namespace Something } } } |
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| Pretty much every language with a class that contains a function with a loop that breaks on an inner condition would be 4 levels deep. I suppose Objective-C would only be 3 deep, but I can’t think of any others off the top of head. |
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| 2 levels in Smalltalk, unless I’m missing something? !SomeClass methodsFor: ”something” stamp: ”kks 6/30/2018 16:11”! find: key 1 to: self items length do: ] ! ! |
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| I do like having the namespace there, if only to gently nudge you towards better architecture. As a temp fix I have overridden Rider’s code formatting to not indent within the namespace, but C# 10 will bring file scoped namespaces. You can just declare the namespace between the imports and the classes, and everything in the file will be namespaced automatically. |
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| I’ve heard this “no more than 3 levels of indentation” thing before, but isn’t that somewhat language specific? If in coding in python, I have 1 level for being inside a class, 1 level for being inside a function, and that gives me only 1 level to write actual program flow with. I find it hard to believe that a double nested for loop, having 4 levels of indentation, is in-itself a sign that I have to “fix my program”. |
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| The 3 levels of indentation, is about being mindful of runtime complexity. For example, do you really need four or more levels of for loops in a function. This “rule” is very domain specific. If you are writing for the Linux Kernel. You should rethink your strategy if you need something that is very nested. However there are places that where such nesting might be the favorable way to do a task so that the code maintains long term readability. Most often this is for something that runtime complexity isn’t a important factor. I’ve seen this most often in document and report generation. |
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| List comprehensions in Python allow you to avoid having to add another level of indentation. If the feature did not exist, a lot of Python code would be one more level deep. Language features definitely have an effect on the number of indentation levels you need. Map and reduce reduce the number, Node-style callbacks increase it, etc. Although I suppose a Linux kernel developer would consider having to write Node JS code as ‘being screwed’. |
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| Personally I agree with the sentiment of no more than three indentations, but I don’t take it as a hard rule (mostly because I’m not writing kernel code). I think it is very language specific. In Python I’d probably ignore the “rule” outright. |
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| 4 character indents are already too big.8 character indented code is vomit inducing.2 character indents and any modern monospace font is enough for readability. I concede that reading 2 indented is hard when you begin braces on a new line – but then your problem is beginning braces on a new line, not the indent. |
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| I’m one of the monsters that prefers 2 space tabs for my small monitor, 2 files side by side. Like you said and other comments, no newline opening braces, don’t mix tab and space for OCD trailing comment and argument alignment. On the other hand, I don’t code for 20 hours straight because I need to do laundry and dishes and family stuff. |
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| This presumes one isn’t using real tab characters in their code. (No idea why they claim tabs are 8 spaces, as they’re their own character.) The rest of these arguments are just curious decisions by a certain community. The point is for the visual indentation to be up to the end user, seasoned to taste. Requiring some code viewer to stick to n spaces is unfriendly. (I’d sooner quit programming altogether than follow the above rules.) |
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| That’s certainly true for spaghetti kernel or firmware code, but certainly not true for application code, with a much higher abstraction.8 char indentation also doesn’t make your code easier to read, on the contrary. Your eyes need to move much further. |
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| I have a hard time believing these opinions are correct because they were heavily constrained based on column size and monitors of the old days. So it’s not like the community freely came to this conclusion after a lot of informed experimentation. |
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| Just because you have an ultra-wide, 8K monitor in 2021 doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to write 400 character lines. This argument is specious. In fact 80 columns is as much related to readability as it is to hardware limitations of yore.100-something columns for code can be a pretty big relaxation over 80, but beyond that it gets into diminishing returns. |
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| I generally agree. I once played with 130 and found that to be crazy. Settled on 100 (when it’s my own project). My point is that it’s not like they came up with these opinions based on a sandbox of experimentation. The opinions on line length, indentation, etc. are all results of constraints at the time. Which makes the opinions on things like “80 chars, 8 char tabs” feel like retcons. |
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| At least most people are agreeing on using tabs, as opposed to putting spaces in and trying to hardcode their preference. If we use tabs, then we can just have whatever tab stop we personally want, and nobody else is the wiser. |
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| No you can’t, because material that is aligned between lines that have different indentation gets screwed. struct foo ; struct foo ; Only the x and y lines moved when the tab size changed, so the comment is screwed. This is a nonstarter. If you use tabs, assume 8, or don’t use tabs. If you want flexible tabs, you must rigidly adhere to formatting rules which ban internal alignment between lines that are at different indentation levels. Problem with this banning is that whereas it reasonably applies to comments like what I showed, those comments are a strawman example of internal alignment. Here is a less of a strawman example: OK, this will work if we use exactly one tab for both lines, and then spaces for aligning the arguments: I’m not sure how good the editor support is for this; on a team of 15, you will easily find two who will mess this up often enough that the team’s adjustable tab dream will crumble. If you want code that looks good with different tab sizes, that’s a goal. Goals have to be verified and enforced, or they fall apart. You need a well-written commit filter which detects situations where moving tabs will wreck apparent alignment, or else team members need to waste their time policing this in reviews. The most productive thing is to just ban tabs. The code looks one way, modulo your local font setting, and that’s it. |
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| An alternative is to use soft tabs for anything that needs to be aligned, especially if the things appears after other code which is already indented. An even better alternative is to not use align code like this, as it invariably leads to soul crushing diffs and merge conflicts when you have to change the size of the longest line. |
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| Just tab in under the function definition on a new line. Done. >The most productive thing is to just ban tabs. There are valid accessibility reasons to prefer tabs to spaces. |
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| There simply aren’t. The accessibility problem has to be solved such that people with visual impairments can just as effectively work with code that is indented with spaces, because there is a lot of it out there and you cannot just reindent everything with tabs. Just because code is indented with character 32 rather than 9 doesn’t mean that this indentation cannot be presented in an adjustable way. |
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| Notepad++ has a nice feature to convert leading spaces and tabs back and forth though I never used it on a big mess of a file to convert to tabs to see if it is successful there. Every editor I’ve encountered beyond Notepad/Wordpad let’s the user specify tabwidth. The accessiblity issue for me is poverty and eyestrain. I like big fonts on my small monitor in my small apartment. |
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| I’m curious, why would you ever want to align something like that? I’ve only ever seen “but it breaks my alignment” as the only argument from the spaces people but so far I have not yet seen a good reason as to why that alignment is desired in the first place. Comments like that seem extremely unlikely to me, comments are for explaining a non-obvious “but why” and that’s better in a paragraph above the code, especially if you use tools like doxygen who expect them there. And in the function example I assume you do it because the args don’t ‘fit’ on one line but then why not just have your editor wrap the line (and optionally indent by one level)? To spot the function name better? Why not use syntax highlighting for that? And even then just use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, what would be the reason to force spaces on everyone else and make them suffer from an indentation width they don’t like? |
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| > I have not yet seen a good reason as to why that alignment is desired in the first place Alignment is desired because it enhances readability. All good visual design incorporates elements of alignment, grouping, separation and so on. > why not just have your editor wrap the line We could write function calls, no matter how many arguments they have or how large the expressions, on one line. That will result in an excessive line length. Generally, you want to avoid code wider than about 100 columns. You may find yourself working with a prescribed coding convention which imposes such a constraint. If you rely on an editor wrapping the line in a clever way, that’s good for you. But you don’t now how other tools will react to the long lines.E.g. someone wanting a print out of the code may find that the lines are getting truncated. > what would be the reason to force spaces on everyone else and make them suffer from an indentation width they don’t like? Using tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment requires extra care, and a carefully tuned editor setup which understands the semantic difference between the tabs and the spaces which follow. In any sizeable team, deviations in formatting will creep in. Enforcing it will just be a big waste of time, compared to the simplicity of banishing tabs. People who suffer from an indentation width they don’t like have a psychological problem that perhaps makes them unsuitable for this line of work. The professional developer can happily work with any indentation format and maintain it as-is. The only halfway valid argument here is regarding people with severe visual disabilities. Everything else is whiny primadonna fluff. Tabs are still not the right tool here; accessibility has to be solved in such a way that the visually disabled developer is able to work equally well with any code that is thrown their way, tabs or spaces. You don’t get to work on nothing but code that was developed in-house with accessibility in mind. Third-party code happens. Also, you are overlooking that indentation isn’t necessarily aligned to an absolute grid of tab stops. Nested indentation can start at a misaligned position. (let ((fun (lambda (arg) (indented-two-spaces)))) (also-two-spaces)) The indentation within the lambda is relative to the (lambda, form in the previous line. If we change the variable name from fun to func, the entire lambda moves to the right by one character. (let ((func (lambda (arg) (indented-two-spaces)))) (also-two-spaces)) “Tabs for indentation” is not a generally valid principle. It could work if tabs actually expanded to a fixed number of spaces, rather than advancing to an aligned tab stop. (let ((fun (lambda (arg) (indented-by-simply-expanding-tab)))) (also-indented-by-tab with split arguments)) Now suppose the whole thing above is at some nesting level: (let ((fun (lambda (arg) (indented-by-naive-tab)))) (also-indented-by-tab with split arguments)) As you can see, we need a more general mixture of tabs and spaces to have resizeable tabs such that alignment is preserved. Furthermore, tabs have to just expand to a given number of spaces (acting as a kind of variable-width “superspace”), rather than forward to the next aligned tab stop. (I don’t think my editor can do this and don’t know of any which can). The code will not look right except on such an editor. |
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| > Alignment is desired because it enhances readability. While that’s true I was asking specifically about those examples of yours. What would be the reason to have a weird L shaped comment around the code like that? Right now I can only see two situations in which something is aligned in code, the first one being something like this int foo; double a; because for some reason people like to have variables like that. Personally I don’t see why anyone would want to do that but if they want to insert extra spaces they can do that, it’s trivial to clang format before the commit and absolutely nobody even has the idea of using tabs there. The second one are function arguments over multiple lines. Personally again I find it a bit ridiculous that someone absolutely needs to have void foo(arg, arg arg, arg) when void foo( arg, arg, arg, arg) is just as readable and even saves you keystrokes because you can use an indent level for the alignment of the arguments and just have one tab (well two, since it’s two lines) there instead of the 9 spaces you otherwise need. But again if they prefer the other style then that’s fine, but it’s no reason to force them to do the indentation with spaces too. Your example is flawed, you should never mix tabs and spaces like that, tabs never follow spaces. You use tabs to indent to whatever level you’re currently on and then if you really want that alignment for whatever reasons you use spaces for the rest. > Enforcing it will just be a big waste of time, compared to the simplicity of banishing tabs. I don’t think a clang format commit hook is that hard to enforce. Not to mention that you are enforcing formatting anyway, otherwise you end up with one person using 2 spaces and the other 8. And if you already enforce that then there is no reason to not just enforce using tabs for indentation since they are objectively superior. > People who suffer from an indentation width they don’t like have a psychological problem that perhaps makes them unsuitable for this line of work. The professional developer can happily work with any indentation format and maintain it as-is. > The only halfway valid argument here is regarding people with severe visual disabilities. Everything else is whiny primadonna fluff. Do you really think that dismissing people’s preferences as psychological disorders is a good idea? Especially in a community that likes to customize the shit out of everything? Why shouldn’t they be allowed to see the code however they like? That’s literally the idea of using tabs, you can see them as 37 spaces if you like but for me it’s 4. If you want to do any extra alignment after the indentation then use spaces, sure. But who are you to decide how far right on my screen the body of the loop appears? Tbh if you ask me I find your proposal straightup draconic, you rather ban tabs completely rather than using the available tooling and/or properly training your people to enable everyone to work as they see fit. Yeah sure most people can work with a 8 spaces codebase if forced to but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. And since you brought up disabilities: I’ve worked with someone who had only one eye, he didn’t do any indentation because otherwise he’d have to constantly move his head around. Set tabwidth to 0 in his editor and you don’t need to do any reformatting on commits if you indent using tabs. Force spaces on everyone and he needs to do a reformat all the time. > (I don’t think my editor can do this and don’t know of any which can). I’m not sure I follow why this is necessary. They already act like that, the only tabs not being as wide as X spaces are the ones that follow a non-tab character and at that point you are no longer doing indentation anyway so a tab should not even exist there. Though I don’t see a reason to not have this, should be a simple setting in any editor. |
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| > there is no reason to not just enforce using tabs for indentation since they are objectively superior. I just demonstrated one. The semantics of tabs is that they move the printing position to the next tab stop position, which is absolutely determined, rather than relatively. This does not work for nested indentation in modern (or even not-so-modern) programming languages. If we re-imagine the tab as simply being a macro which expands to a configurable number of spaces, then tabs could be objectively superior. It makes sense to advocate for that, and I’m all for it; but I don’t place a high probability on it happening. Though a simple idea, it would have to be in every editor, and other tools. You almost want to re-purpose some other control character for this purpose and leave tab alone. About: void foo(arg, arg arg, arg) Note that editor support this, so the only keystrokes you need to enter this from scratch, for instance in Vim, are: void foo(arg, argarg, arg) The important attribute here is that the parameter list, which is an independent element of the phrase structure of the language, is presented in such a way that a bounding rectangle can be imagined around it. That rectangle includes only tokens from that element, and not from any other element: +-+ void foo|(arg, arg | | arg, arg)| +-+ Boxes help readability; that’s why we use tables and grids for presenting information or laying out user interfaces. Ideally, this principle would be applied to every syntactic element. Looking at complex examples of Lisp code, I can’t find a single counter-example: every sub-expression can be boxed in a rectangle which includes only that expression and its constituents: modulo a few closing parens that are written out to the right: )))). A big example of this is given below. Now in the descendants of C syntax, the predominant brace placements throw a monkey wrench into this idea. We usually cannot draw a bounding box around a multi-line compound statement or other braced element such that the braces are included, and no tokens of neighboring constructs are included. About that other style, for consistency, I would want this: void foo( arg, arg, arg, arg ) if the opening parenthesis is not on the same line as the arguments, the closing one should not be either. I work in a shop where the style closely resembles this one, except the parameter declarations are on separate lines: int put_bytes( int fd, // comment char *buffer, // comment size_t size, // comment ) Now I personally don’t like this, but I can work with it, and can see the advantages. If you have to add, remove or reorder arguments you are not fiddling with the parentheses at all. When you take a unified diff of the edit, it does not include lines that only differ because of a parenthesis. The lines marked + or – are all “payload”. The inner alignment of the parameter names is helpful, as is having the space for commenting the parameters. I still wouldn’t do this in a side project where I dictate the coding convention, but I can respect that and work with it without grumbling. Now about that bounding box thing, here is a random example I picked from the SBCL compiler sources. The file is: https://github.com/sbcl/sbcl/blob/master/src/compiler/srctra. The macro bound-binop, with some ASCII rectangles inserted, looks like this. Only the closing parentheses at the end violate the principle: the rectangle includes more parentheses than are strictly part of that syntax, and this problem is minimized by closing the parentheses together on the same line. I suspect that the programmers who work with Lisp and find it readable all grok this bounding box model, whether consciouosly or not. (defmacro bound-binop (op x y) +-+ | (with-unique-names (xb yb res) | | +-+ | | | `(and,x,y | | | | +-+ | | | | | (with-float-traps-masked (:underflow :overflow :inexact :divide-by-zero) | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | (let* |((,xb (type-bound-number,x)) | | | | | | | | | | (,yb (type-bound-number,y)) | | | | | | | | | | (,res (safely-binop,op,xb,yb))) | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | (set-bound,res | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | (and |(or (consp,x) (consp,y)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; Open bounds can very easily be messed up | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; by FP rounding, so take care here. | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | |,(ecase op | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (sb-xc:* | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; Multiplying a greater-than-zero with | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; less than one can round to zero. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `(or (not (fp-zero-p,res)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (cond ((and (consp,x) (fp-zero-p,xb)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (>= (abs,yb) 1)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ((and (consp,y) (fp-zero-p,yb)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (>= (abs,xb) 1))))) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (sb-xc:/ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; Dividing a greater-than-zero with | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; greater than one can round to zero. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `(or (not (fp-zero-p,res)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (cond ((and (consp,x) (fp-zero-p,xb)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (<= (abs,yb) 1)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ((and (consp,y) (fp-zero-p,yb)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (<= (abs,xb) 1))))) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ((sb-xc:+ sb-xc:-) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; Adding or subtracting greater-than-zero | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | ;; can end up with identity. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | `(and (not (fp-zero-p,xb)) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | (not (fp-zero-p,yb)))))))))))) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | +-+ | | | +-+ | +-+ |
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| Okay I think I understand your core issue. My position is that you do one indent per open scope and those should be done by tabs. Since those usually appear at the beginning of the line there’s no problem because tabs behave exactly like you want them to (equal X spaces). It also produces nice boxes, especially in C like languages if I may say so, personally I think Python forcing you to obey this principle is actually a good think to teach people. Can look like this: +-+ |namespace foo | | | | | | | +-+ | | | | | | | | // and another scope | | | | +-+ | | |||if (condition) | | | ||| | | | | | +-+ | | ||} | | | +-+ | |} | +-+ Your problem appears when a new scope does not seeem to start at the beginning of a line, correct? For example like this: +-+ |namespace foo | | ); | | ||} | | | +-+ | |} | +-+ If you try to draw a rectangle around only the lambda you have to “indent” the body by spaces to make it nicely aligned like this +-+ |namespace foo | | | | | | | +-+ | | | |); | | ||} | | | +-+ | |} | +-+ and someone misguided could have the really bad idea of first wanting to align a box and then doing the indent for the lambda scope: +-+ |namespace foo | | | | | | | +-+ | | | |); | | ||} | | | +-+ | |} | +-+ That obviously leads to problems, yes, but that is simply someone who did not understand “tabs for indent, spaces for alignment” then. You should train that person better, it’s really not that hard and also there’s tools that can easily warn on such things. Banning tabs gets rid of this problem but it also gets rid of the advantage tabs have, namely that the indentation can look differently to many people without causing any VCS problems. And that’s worth a lot more than saving a one time 2 minute work of enforcing a check for such things in the VCS for a single person. |
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| To clarify, I do not have a problem; I’m simply revealing the existence of certain requirements in the wild. The 1960’s tab modeled after typewriter tab stops is not up to snuff to these requirements. You fall back on spaces, and then you have a half-baked result where only some of the indentation scales with the tab size. I suspect that a successful solution will not involve tabs at all. It’s algorithmically possible for the text presentation tool, such as the editor, to infer which spaces are indentation and which are alignment, informed by the language syntax, and then allow the indentation spaces to have a configurable size. I posited that if tabs had simple expansion semantics (tab produces fixed number of spaces starting at any position) that would also be workable. Unfortunately, it requires integration into way too many tools all at the same time. |
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| Please tell me that putting the struct fields inside the comments was a deliberate homage. |
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| > I’m not sure how good the editor support is for this; on a team of 15, you will easily find two who will mess this up often enough that the team’s adjustable tab dream will crumble. Run things through a linter. |
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| The second example is avoidable by forbidding mixed use of tabs and spaces, as in the two directly following each other. The first example doesn’t do what you want really as x and y are part of the commented out code. |
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| The second example requires a careful mix of leading indentation tabs followed by alignment spaces in order to work correctly: so the editing user can vary the tab size locally, while seeing the correct alignment. If you forbid the mixed leading tabs and spaces, while insisting on tabs for indentation, then you’re ruling out code formatting styles which exhibit such alignment. That’s a worse position that banishing tabs, because you are dictating code formatting ideologies for the sake of your indentation method. The situation of tabs being banished does not, by itself, dictate to what the code should look like. |
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| Which fails silently – someone will make a change that looks good to them, but messes up indentation for anyone else with a different tabstop. Indeed two people looking at the same code might disagree about which block some statements were part of. If you want to use tabs for indentation then you absolutely must enforce that they are used consistently, and I’ve never seen any organisation succeed at that. Whereas if you use spaces then you can simply ban the tab character from all source files (which organisations do enforce), and then at least you guarantee that everyone will see the same thing when they look at a given piece of code. |
/td>
| What you’re describing isn’t messed up indentation but messed up column alignment (trying to align content on multiple lines). Indent only using tabs, based only on scoped, and there’s no possibility of problems. It’s super simple to enforce via linting. People who love column alignment are really painting their code on a grid of characters and expect to be able to paint any coordinate. There are even editors that let you click past the end of the line and they’ll fill in all the spaces to that point. It’s madness, I tells ya. |
/td>
| > What you’re describing isn’t messed up indentation but messed up column alignment (trying to align content on multiple lines). It’s still indentation – the point is lining up the start of a line with some point on the line above. > It’s super simple to enforce via linting. And yet I’ve never seen anywhere manage to actually enforce it in practice. |
/td>
| I hate that scene. “I run a compression company” but apparently he doesn’t know that spaces are trivially compressible and that both HFS+ and APFS have built-in file compression? |
/td>
| i’ve never understood why spaces are used for indentation, bit i’ve ended up adopting it because if everyone else is using spaces, i can’t very well use tabs. there’s, like, a message in there about life and society. |
/td>
| I think the role of a tab in a code editor is different from the role of a tab in a document editor. I have always used dedicated code editors and prefer tabs (but like you, I use and specify spaces for code style). I think people who use editors that are multi-purpose generally see these alternate usages of tab as problematic or even illogical. I think this is often the linux people, and they are often the most experienced and influential coders. I think that is why spaces are generally seen as the preferred method. |
/td>
| Because everyone has tabs set differently, so code always looks wrong, even if you use the same editor. A space is a space is a space. |
/td>
| > always looks wrong Only if you are mixing tabs and spaces in a strange way. If you use tabs reasonably then it looks right to each user’s preferences. I think the reason that spaces are popular are that it is more obvious when done wrong. We should probably just have better code review tools that highlight when tabs are used for anything but initial indentation. It is as simple as /\t/. The other downside of tabs is that you don’t have a well defined line width, but IMHO line limits are a fairly silly lint anyways, you should make the code look reasonable. I find that formatters based on line length limits tend to make code very awkward to read. |
/td>
| I think it’s as simple as the fact that spaces are easy to hit with your thumb, and tabs are hard to hit with your pinky. At least that’s why I do it! |
/td>
| It’s amusing to see this on HN. I always preferred TABs, but for most of my SW programming life I’ve been told to prefer spaces. I’m actually surprised to hear folks here preferring TABs – I first read your comment as humor. Perhaps the pendulum has shifted (again)? |
/td>
| Truly scary honestly. I cringe whenever I see spaces hardcoded. I feel the same way about line width with hard stops too though. There is no longer a need for line limits and is the whole point of linewraps. |
/td>
| Back when the Tab character was first invented, the indentation was always to a multiple of the 8th column; there was no option for anything else. Not sure why anyone thinks living 50 years in the past is a good idea. |
/td>
| Because, the tab being fixed at some specific, agreed-upon value is better than it being a moving target. If you use tabs in a plain text document, you know what they are going to do because of the 8 space tab de facto standard. You could also know what tabs are going to do in a plain text document, if plain text had a standard way to program the tab size. To say, okay, in this line, we have 4 space tabs. Or these specific tab stops at these columns. But here is no such standard thing; therefore, any tab size option ends up being something that is outside of the representation of the text. It’s a setting in the text editor, or terminal or rendering software (e.g. monospaced text to ps/pdf). The user has to somehow find out what tab size the text “wants”, and then configure it. And that tab size fiddling is a sucky waste of time everyone hates; why can’t the text just assume 8 so the default works? |
/td>
| I read that bit about the two developers also. It was never explained what the 8-space indent person’s visual impairment might be; I suspect that it’s a field of vision problem: difficulty tracking vertically between distant elements that are expected to be at the same indentation level. Editors can help here by rendering some vertical lines to guide the eyesight. Nobody should have to resort to huge tabs because of a vertical tracking problem. I really think solving the adaptive indentation problem with tabs is a nonstarter. You have to adapt the tools to the reams of existing code, not vice versa, The editor, in combination with recognizing the syntax of the language to some extent, could treat leading indentation spaces in a flexible “tab like” way. Indentation that is excessive to the visually impaired developer could be reduced by assigning fractional widths to just leading spaces, like 1/8, 1/4 or 1/2 a cell. The editor has to separate indentation spaces from alignment spaces for this purpose. Another approach could be that, quite simply: the editor groks the indentation and renders it flexibly. It deduces that a certain line of code is three levels indented and then renders that however the user wants, regardless of whether the three levels come from three tabs, 24 spaces, or a mixture of tabs or spaces or whatever. If the editor knows that two space indentation is in effect, and some line with 30 spaces is deduced to be at four indentation levels, then it knows that eight spaces of that line are rendered as abstract indentation, and the remaining spaces are literal, for alignment. This is not some Hard Problem in software where we have to throw our hands in the air and conclude that the only way is to achieve the requirements is to have tabs in the data. |
/td>
| These days our editors are already doing a huge amount of parsing of our code. I know I’ve seen one editor, probably Visual Studio, that can determine your nesting level and draw vertical lines to delineate it. |
/td>
| I don’t think 8 characters was ever an official standard, just a de facto one. The problem is that it’s too large for most modern use cases. These days I find myself using smart editors that combine auto-indenting with tab-to-space conversion. You won’t find a tab character in any of my files. |
/td>
| > it’s too large for most modern use cases. That’s just opinion, though; some lunatics think that 8 space indentation is just fine, and they control what goes into the Linux kernel. Basically, either you think 8 space indentation is fine, or else you regard 8 character tabs as not being suitable for the indentation use case (either you write off the tab entirely, or else subdue its size). It has nothing to do with modern; programmers revolted at 8 space indentation in 1980 also. Indentation of less than 8 is not a modern trend. Case study: V6 Unix, 1975. C compiler uses hard tabs for indentation: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/. (Was that viewed as 8 spaces though, when edited?) When we look at Yacc in the same release, we see the germination of the problem of mixed style. Part of the source uses two space indentation. Part of it uses hard tabs. Other conventions also differ: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V6/usr/source/. Yikes! That’s exactly the sort of thing that leads to tabs being banned. > You won’t find a tab character in any of my files. I could almost say the same, except (1) rare accidents happen and (2) some of them are makefiles. |
/td>
| What the linked thread doesn’t mention is that github respects editorconfig files. If you create one in your repo and set the number of spaces a tab should represent, it uses that as default for the repo. Maybe the feature hadn’t been launched yet in 2018? https://editorconfig.org/ |
/td>
| Wow, the linked discussion turned toxic pretty fast for something so trivial. It’s surprising no one in that thread mentioned that there is a good reason to keep it the way it is, namely to avoid screwing up the formatting of files on GitHub by sticking to an ages-old, well-known default. |
/td>
| It’s awfully useful for detecting indentation errors. Everyone uses 4, so anything that uses something else will make it obvious when someone has borked up the whitespace (which always seems to happen on projects that use tabs). |
/td>
| Looks like this thread is devolving into a tab vs space war again, an eternal holy war without end except at local level where some VP of engineering put down a decree one way or another and the plebs begrudgingly follow. |
/td>
| The choice isn’t really “tabs vs spaces”, it’s “(tabs and spaces) vs (spaces)”. And 8 char indentation is ludicrous. |
/td>
| Ludicrous, nope, it’s the standard. See: linux kernel. To quote from the coding style: “Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8 characters. There are heretic movements that try to make indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.” If it works for a multi-million line C code base like the linux kernel withou any real problem, then it’s definitely not ludicrous. If you find yourself indenting too much, then write some helper functions. https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v4.10/process/coding-style.h. |
/td>
| 1, 1, 2, 3? Seems like too small an increment scheme. Minor /s here. Inaccuracy in specifications lead to inaccuracies in code. |
/td>
| The first couple indents don’t really need much anyway. Especially if you’re writing something like the C# example elsewhere in the thread. if (CompareTag(“Player”)) in that example is 24 characters in from the side, but four would really feel better. If you’re using a language that’s less indenty, maybe you want to start further on in the sequence. Although, in all honesty, I’ve never used fibonacci tabs, it’s just something to suggest to move the discussion elsewhere. 😀 |
/td>
| Fibonacci? Never! Golden ratio with fractional spaces. With fibonacci someone is always going to screwup the whitespace. :p |
/td>
| This is why I don’t use tabs, and instead use 2 spaces for indentation like a sane and reasonable person. |
/td>
| I haven’t seen any poll results (yet!), but I bet we’re in a pretty small minority. Two spaces is jist what i find most aesthetically pleasing. Four seems to be the standard among my peers, and the apparent fact that the standard is historically eight boggles my mind. |
/td>
| Well, it was (kind of) a joke about “sane and reasonable” because everyone seems to have their favorite reasons for preferring one way or another. I agree about it being aesthetically pleasing. For me it’s the easiest spacing to read and scan code horizontally and diagonally. And apparently: > using spaces instead of tabs is associated with as high a salary difference as an extra 2.4 years of experience. https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/06/15/developers-use-spaces-. |
/td>
| I cowardly use tabs viewed as 2 spaces so if needed in the future some quick lazy code like sed can convert it to 4 spaces or something if someone demands. |
/td>
/td>
How many spaces is \t in C?
\t is a horizontal tab and it is used to give 8 blank horizontal spaces in the output of the program where it is placed.
Why are tabs 8 spaces?
This has a long history – starting back in the days of typewriters, teletype terminals and whatnot. And typewriters traditionally had tab stops every 8 characters (although on many models this could be manually adjusted). Technically: A tab is not X spaces: It advances the cursor (or typewriter) to the next tab stop.
What is the standard tab size?
DigitalOcean provides cloud products for every stage of your journey. Get started with $200 in free credit! The tab-size property in CSS is used to adjust the amount of spaces that display for the tab character. pre Have a play with these range sliders to see how different values effect how tabs render (when you can actually see tabs): See the Pen rNBLYaP by Chris Coyier ( @chriscoyier ) on CodePen,
- The tab character (unicode U+0009) is typically converted to spaces (unicode U+0020) by the white space processing rules and then collapsed so that only one space in a row is displayed in the browser.
- Therefore the tab-size property is only useful when the white space processing rules do not apply, namely inside a tag and when the white-space property of an element is set to pre-wrap,
The default value for the tab-size property is 8 space characters, and it can accept any positive integer value. He are some examples of the various ways tab-size can be used: See the Pen rNBLYjg by Chris Coyier ( @chriscoyier ) on CodePen, As you can see in the examples above, the tab-size property adjusts the amount of space allotted for the tab character.
Are tabs and spaces the same?
Learn from the community’s knowledge. Experts are adding insights into this AI-powered collaborative article, and you could too. This is a new type of article that we started with the help of AI, and experts are taking it forward by sharing their thoughts directly into each section.
If you’d like to contribute, request an invite by liking or reacting to this article. Learn more — The LinkedIn Team Last updated on Jul 1, 2023 One of the most debated topics among programmers is whether to use tabs or spaces for indentation. Indentation is the practice of aligning code blocks with a certain number of characters, usually four or eight, to make the code more readable and organized.
Tabs and spaces are two different ways of creating indentation, but they have different implications for code quality, consistency, and collaboration. In this article, you will learn about the benefits and drawbacks of using tabs vs spaces for indentation, and how to choose the best option for your project.
Is a tab equal to a space?
The Tab is the same width as four to five spaces, depending on the font.
Why is tab so big in Word?
The typical explanation is that you’ve accidentally clicked at the end of the Ruler which set a tab stop at that point. If so just clear that stop & the default stops will be restored.
What is normal tab spacing?
How to Set Tabs in Word By using tab stops in your document, you can create uniformly spaced text. And, unlike if you were to just enter a bunch of spaces to separate text, tabs ensure your text remains properly aligned. Each time you press the Tab key, the cursor moves to the next tab stop.
By default, Word has left tab stops set at every half-inch, but you can create your own tab stops in a specific position or change the location of the existing tab stops. Before you start adjusting tab stops, make sure to turn on both formatting marks and the ruler. The formatting marks make it easy to see what’s going on in your document, especially when it comes to tabs.
The ruler is necessary to easily add, move, and remove tab stops.
- Click the Show/Hide ¶ button on the Home tab.
- Click the View tab.
- Click the Ruler checkbox in the Show group.
Each space is represented by a dot (·) each pilcrow (¶) is a new paragraph, and each arrow (→) is a tab.
- Select the text you want to align.
- Select the type of tab stop you want to use.
- Click on the ruler where you want to place the tab stop.
The tab icon at the upper-left shows the type of tab that’s active. If you want something else, click the icon to cycle through the available options.
The tab stop is added and everything after the tab is aligned to it.
| Types of Tab Stops | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Left | Center | Right | Decimal | Bar |
| Aligns the left side of text with the tab stop. | Aligns the text so that it’s centered under the tab stop. | Aligns the right side of text with the tab stop. | Aligns text and numbers by decimal point. | A vertical line character is inserted at the bar tab. |
If you want to create an additional tab at an exact location, you can use a custom tab stop.
- Click the Home tab.
- Click the Paragraph dialog box launcher.
- Click Tabs,
- Type a tab stop position.
- Select the type of tab stop you want to use in the Alignment section.
- Click Set,
- Click OK,
You can set a tab leader here, which is a series of dots, dashes, or line that extends across the empty space added by a tab. These are very helpful when you need to line up information across multiple lines, like in a directory or table of contents.
The tab stop is added. You can repeat the process to add more tab stops.
- The tab stops you set are added to the selected paragraph.
- Click the Clear button in the Tabs dialog box to remove a single tab stop or click the Clear All button to remove all tab stops.
- You can adjust a tab stop directly from the ruler, moving it to a new position or removing it entirely.
- Click and drag a tab stop along the ruler to reposition it.
- Click and drag a tab stop off the ruler to remove it.
As you drag a tab stop to a new position on the ruler, the text affected by that tab stop will move with it.
Removing a tab stop will shift the text over to the next tab stop. If another tab stop isn’t set, the text will instead use the default half-inch tab spacing. : How to Set Tabs in Word
Is a tab 12 spaces?
By default, a tab in Microsoft Word is set to be the equivalent of four spaces.
Why spaces vs tabs?
The Tab Character – Pressing the tab button on the keyboard outputs a tabulation character. It is interpreted by the editor as an amount of white space, usually 4 or 8 spaces. Files that are formatted with tabs are usually smaller, since a single tab character represents multiple whitespaces.
Not that it’s much of a problem nowadays. The tab length is interpreted differently in IDEs and editors. It is also configurable, so if you would like to have tabulations of 6 spaces – you can. This makes tabs a great tool for people with visual impairments – they are customizable. Tabs are descriptive – they tell the editor the amount of indentation that should be added.
But the decision about how to render them depends on who reads the code. In the mind of a tab user, they should be used for indentation and spaces should be used for alignment.
How many spaces equal an indent?
Standard paragraph indentation is about five spaces or one-quarter to one-half of an inch, depending on which style guide you follow. In online writing, if your software doesn’t allow indentation, insert a line space to indicate a new paragraph.
Why are there 4 spaces instead of tabs?
If a couple of people work on same file it is highly possible to generate unnecessary conflicts. Using spaces instead of tabs makes it possible to easily catch such an accidental space on eyeball and this is probably a reason, why using them become a standard.
Should Python indent 2 or 4 spaces?
How it works – To create an indent using Mu or Trinket, use the TAB key on the keyboard. This will create a space and indent your cursor. Mu and Trinket (and most code editors) will also try and help you indent your code, automatically putting in indents when you press Enter after a :, 
Python doesn’t mind whether you use two spaces or four spaces (or any other number of spaces) as long as you are consistent. For example if you start off using four spaces for an indent, then you should always use four spaces. In the example below, four spaces have been used for the first indent, but only two for the second, and you can see that as a result the code doesn’t “line up”. phrase = input ( “Talk to me > ” ) if phrase == “hi” : print ( “hello” ) print ( “how are you?” ) Running this program will result in an error stating IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level, Note: All Python requires is that you are consistent.
How many spaces is \t in C?
\t is a horizontal tab and it is used to give 8 blank horizontal spaces in the output of the program where it is placed.
Is a tab 12 spaces?
By default, a tab in Microsoft Word is set to be the equivalent of four spaces.
Why is tab 8 spaces?
This has a long history – starting back in the days of typewriters, teletype terminals and whatnot. And typewriters traditionally had tab stops every 8 characters (although on many models this could be manually adjusted). Technically: A tab is not X spaces: It advances the cursor (or typewriter) to the next tab stop.
How much spaces is a indent?
Although the size of an indent varies according to the style guide used (such as the Chicago Manual of Style, MLA, or APA Style), the standard indent is the equivalent of five typed spaces —or about one-half inch. In written text, a new paragraph generally introduces the start of a fresh thought or idea.