🚀 go-pugleaf

In comp.lang.java.advocacy Ryan Breidenbach <ryan_breidenbach@hotmail.com> wrote:

:> : Yes, but almost all editors will allow you to place spaces instead of
:> : tabs, still saving keystokes.
:> 
:> It's not the same when outdenting.

: Agreed. Still, most decent IDEs/text editors will handle this for you,
: as well (usually by hitting Shift+Tab).

That only seems to work if you select the line first.

There are formatters as well - but even with them you still outdent
manually sometimes.

: Even so, this doesn't seem to outweigh how much tabs can jack up how
: code looks.

: As I mentioned before, I see people using them to line up things other
: than standard indentions (e.g. methods, inner classes, etc).

: For example, many people like to line up variable declarations like
: so:

:   private int              id;
:   private PreparedStatment stmt;
:   private String           name;

: As you can see in my post, they remain lined up, because they are
: aligned with spaces. Suppose I used tabs instead, but I set my tabs to
: equal two spaces (hey, it's my choice). Suppose you have your tabs set
: to four spaces. Here is what that code would look like with tabs:

:   private int                               id;
:   private PreparedStatement stmt;
:   private String                    name;

: Huh? That doesn't look so good. God help you if you have your tabs set
: to eight :-) This is why I can't stand tabs.

None of this is a problem if you do as I described - have your editor
tabify on downloading source, and untabify it again when
uploading it again.

If you do that, tabs tend to help - rather than hinder.
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