I understand that many people have differing problems with just tabs. All of the printing, cating and screen dumping issues are most likely in an environment where you can use
pr -te 4 ... | more Many other out if the IDE/editor issues can be solved with something similar. My main issue is, about in the editor/IDE. Iff there are just tabs, then anything that your IDE does with tab expansion does not hide indentation. Iff there are only spaces, then while you are viewing, you won't see anything odd. But when you start editing, then you have to have your tabs set to the same number of spaces as the source file. Of you expand tabs to spaces all us well. If you don't, then then next person to view the file with a different tab setting will have a nightmare. Sure, you have to do tabs only or spaces only everywhere for anything to work. With tabs you lose the problem in the editor of needing the same expansion factor. Gregg Sent from my iPhone On Dec 4, 2010, at 10:26 AM, Niclas Hedhman <nic...@hedhman.org> wrote: > I have some issues around tabs; > > 1. There are more than one "use tabs" convention out there; > a. One tab for an indentation. > b. Tab onto next 8 character modulo. (Example; many JDK files) > > 2. For 1a, when catting a source file in the console, it becomes > unreadable due to the 8 character expansion that happens there. > For 1b. It becomes totally unreadable if you don't have your tab > expansion set to 8 characters. > > 3. Some (not all) projects that claim to use tabs, don't enforce it, > so unless you are actually using the same as everyone else, > indentation is buggered. > > > So the difference between theory and practice is that in theory there > is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there > is. > > > But I will not get involved in the flamewar that normally follows when > this is brought up. ;-) > > > Cheers > > On Thu, Dec 2, 2010 at 10:40 PM, Gregg Wonderly <gr...@wonderly.org> wrote: >> As I've said here before and elsewhere, I really feel that tabs only is the >> most beneficial indentation to use. The reason is that it allows people who >> use odd tab intervals to still see things and use their tab key while >> editing without having to change their IDE settings while editing. >> >> Sun has an old formatting document that discusses using spaces only, and >> netbeans does this by default. The biggest issue for me, of course, is that >> I use 4 character tab expansion and tabs only in all of my development. >> >> In an open source world, all tabs is really the only thing that provides the >> most flexibility it seems to me. >> >> Gregg Wonderly >> > > > > -- > Niclas Hedhman, Software Developer > http://www.qi4j.org - New Energy for Java > > I live here; http://tinyurl.com/2qq9er > I work here; http://tinyurl.com/2ymelc > I relax here; http://tinyurl.com/2cgsug
