[jdrek1]

> But my main gripe with tabs is that no one agrees on the width.

That's the entire point of tabs. One tab means one indentation level and you as the user can decide how that's displayed. Spaces forces everyone to see the code exactly as whoever decided on his favourite width and that is in the best case "only" annoying to people with different preferences and in the worst case actively hurtful to people with disabilities.

The only argument spaces people ever have is "some of my colleagues are too stupid to properly indent with tabs and align with spaces" and that is trivially fixed by either of those:

- don't use alignment, it's useless anyway

- get better coworkers

- educate your coworkers

- use commit hooks to check wrong usage

So basically there is no argument left on the spaces side at all^[1]. Meanwhile tabs semantically mean "one indentation level", take up less bytes, and most importantly allow everyone to have their own preferences without affecting other people. And honestly I am insanely baffled by how many people don't get the importance of that last part. Accessibility like that costs you nothing but means the world to other people, similarly how we have ramps at public buildings for the elder, wheelchair users, strollers, and so on. And not to mention the fact that there are a lot of autistic people in programming, which often have a harder time dealing with things not being as they want them to be. Is there any reason to choose an objectively inferior method and force that onto those demographics just because "muh alignment"?

[1] Okay fine, there is one: "Tools I don't own don't display tabs as I want them, for example GitHub with their retarded default of 8". But first of all you can change that if you're logged in and second you're supposed to use your IDE and not a web interface...

[Asraelite]

I would agree that there aren't any arguments for spaces and would be 100% on the side of tabs, except for one problem: variable width means you can't enforce a maximum column limit.

Some people don't care about column limits, but they're important to me because I like to tile multiple editor panes side-by-side with no space wasted.

The entire debate is stupid anyway and should already be a solved problem. If we used tooling that operates on syntax trees instead of source text, then every developer could have exactly the formatting they want without conflicts. I don't know why that isn't more widespread; the only language I know of to do it is Unison.

[aeonik]

Why can't you just have a linter or a hook check that (tabs*2 + chars) < $defined_width