Curt Sampson wrote:
Jacob Rus <jrus@...> writes:
No there isn't. And this is a truly wacky convention from emacs?
It's not just emacs; this is very common in vi as well.
Really? people use 4 spaces for the first tab stop, but a single tab for the second? I had never heard of that before...
There are two major issues with changing the tab size from 8 columns:
- There's no standard for carrying the tab size around with the file. Given any
file, there's no way to tell if it uses 8 or 4 column tabs without manually inspecting it.
- Changing tab sizes to change indent doesn't work because often tabs are
used at the end of a line to line things up:
SOME_THING = 'un' # one OTHER_THING = 'deux' # two YET_ANOTHER_THING = 'trois' # threeIn this situation, if you're not using the original coders [sic] tab size, you end up with the stuff at the right-hand not lining up.
Ok, fine. Changing tab size could be bad, if someone still is using some random editor no one has ever heard of, which can't handle any tab size other than 8. So what's the benefit to coding like this instead of just using spaces? Is it just saving a few bytes?
-Jacob