Like vim, for example? Which supports replacing tab inputs with spaces...

When looking at the code, tab-containing files are the most inconsistent ones, especially when viewed via general tools (less, diff, even web viewers).

Sure, if people would only ever use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, things could be good. But this almost never happens, instead:

... some lines start with spaces, some with tabs. This looks fine in someone's IDE but the moment you use "diff" or "grep" which adds a prefix, things break and lines become jagged.

... one contributor uses tabs mid-line while other use spaces. It may look fine in their editor with 6 character tabs, but all the tables are misaligned when looking in app with different tab size.

Given how many corner cases tabs has, I always try to avoid them. Spaces have no corner cases whatsoever and always look nice, no matter what you use to look at the code.

(the only exceptions are formatters which enforce size-8 tabs consistently everywhere. But I have not seen those outside of golang)

> Sure, if people would only ever use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment, things could be good. But this almost never happens, instead: ... some lines start with spaces, some with tabs.

People using tabs for alignment can happen when you've got a tab-camp-person who hasn't yet realized how they're terrible for alignment.

But "some lines start with spaces, some with tabs" happens for precisely two reasons:

* you have a codebase with contributors from both camps

* people thought in-editor tooling was the solution (now you have two problems)

> Spaces have no corner cases whatsoever

This is tooling and (as you realized) stop preference dependent.

And I've been using vim exclusively for north of fifteen years with Tab replacement, never had a problem with the editor getting confused about what happens with spaces when I hit Tab.

Some detail about the corner cases you've run into would be great, if they're happening constantly I can see how it would be a bugbear.

For example with vim (debian) defaults, if you happen to have a 2-space indented Python (the first two spaces are for HN formatting, the first if should start at zero indent):

  if True:
    # Two space indent

And continue to add another if block in that, the autoindent will give you four spaces:

  if True:
    # Two space indent
    if True:
        # Four space autoindent

And if you make a new line after the last row there and hit a backspace, it'll erase one space instead of four, giving an indentation of 3 (+2) spaces. And if you start a new line after that, you'll get an indentation of 8 spaces in total. Ending up with:

  if True:
    # Two space indent
    if True:
        # Four space autoindent
      # Hitting backspace gives this
          # Hitting a tab gives this

This is just a one case, but things like this tend to happen quite often when editing code. Even if it's been originally PEP-8 indented. Usually it's not what the Tab does, but what the Backspace or Autoindent does. I'm not exactly sure what exact Tab/Backspace/Autoindent rules underlie the behavior, but I can imagine there having to be quite a bit of hackery to support soft-tabs.

For me this kind of Tab/Autoindent/Backspace confusion is frequent enough that I'd be very surprised if others don't find themselves having to manually fix the number of spaces every now and then. And when watching over the shoulder I see others too occasionally having to micromanage space-indents (or accidentally ending up with three space indented blocks etc), also with other editors than vim.

This is because ftplugin/python.vim does:

  if !exists("g:python_recommended_style") || g:python_recommended_style != 0
    " As suggested by PEP8.
    setlocal expandtab tabstop=4 softtabstop=4 shiftwidth=4
  endif

So if you use "set sw=2" then it leaves tabstop and softtabstop at 4.

You can set that g:python_recommended_style to disable it.

Also sw=0 uses the tabstop value, and softtabstop=-1 uses the shiftwidth value.

I agree Vim's behaviour there is a bit annoying and confusing, but it doesn't really have anything to do with tabs vs. spaces. I strongly prefer tabs myself as well by the way.

Even when you DO use tabs Vim will use spaces if sw/ts/sts differ by the way. Try sw=2 and using >>, or sts=2 with noexpandtab.

As with most things in vim, it is definitely manageable in settings such as tw=2 (tab width) and sts=2 (soft tab stop). This is why a lot of older Python files, in particular, are littered with vim modelines with settings like these.

The nice modern twist is .editorconfig files and the plugins that support them including for vim. You can use those to set such standard language-specific config concerns in a general way for an entire "workspace" for every editor that supports or has a plugin that supports .editorconfig.

Well, yes. But that's one more small thing to config and manage. Not a big deal in isolation but such small things add up to significant yank.

With Tabs we wouldn't have this yet another papercut to tool over.

Of course you can override it, but is there any excuse for that default behavior? It sounds ridiculous.

Soft tabs at 4 would be fine, though worse than autodetect. But that is not the behavior described in the above post.

The behavior described above seems to me to be exactly soft tabs at 4 in a 2-space tab document with autoindent turned on (often the default).

Vim has no autodetect by default. (I'm sure there's a plugin somewhere.)

The part where the user is on a line indented by 2, hits return, and gets a line indented by 2+4=6 doesn't sound like soft tabs at 4 to me. And I wouldn't expect hitting backspace to then only remove 1 space (if it actually removed 2 that makes more sense, but is inconsistent with what what it just added). At that point, hitting return and getting a line indented by 8 might make sense but is weird.

Another comment suggests it's using 2 and 4 for different settings and that's causing problems.

2 is the base indent of the line where the : was added. Autoindent adds 4 spaces for the current tab stop. Autoindent isn't using some counts of indents, it's taking "spaces in previous line + tab stop".

Backspace doesn't unindent in vim by default, it removes spaces one at a time. That's a difference between the ts=4 (tab stop) and sts=4 (soft tab stop) is sts also applies to backspace. But the default is that it doesn't because the out of the box default believes that backspace operates on physical characters (spaces) not soft/fake ones (tabs expanded to spaces) by default.

I don't know if that is the right default, and it is definitely a baroque exercise to get all the settings right for some languages, but there is a consistency to the defaults even if those defaults don't meet some modern expectations from newer code editors.

(Also, I just realized above I confused tw [text width] and ts [tab stop]; my vim skills are rusting a little.)

That doesn't explain how it then goes to 8 total spaces.

Almost every text editor has support for tabs-as-spaces.

I haven't used an IDE in years.

I don't want that though. Because then when editing I still have to mess around with spaces.

And the double nature of the spaces makes it hard to see when you have an odd number of spaces when you reach deep indenting levels, which counts as the lesser number of double spaces in Python.

IMO it would be ideal if tabs would be displayed as a block, and you could resize the width of that block on the fly <3

Is there any editor in 2024 that can't replace tabs with spaces? Is it just Notepad?