On Saturday 27 September 2003 05:16, Frank Barknecht wrote:
As a tab is just one character and not 8 or 2 or 4, there is no "rule" on Unix that it is eight spaces normally. The eight character thing is just the width, some editors like to show a tab.
Personally I set the tabwidth in Vim to 4 because 8 is much to wide for my tastes. But someone else wouldn't know this, it makes no difference when using real tabs like "\t".
Using expaned tabs everyone would see 4 spaces for indenting in my code and would have to live with it. That's one of the reasons I prefer \t-tabs in my code, the other is faster navigation (faster moving over less characters).
In Pd or any C language this is really no problem at all, but I do program a lot in Python, and here a community project has to agree on one single indentation/tab style.
ciao
Frank, what you're describing is how tab characters are intended to be used. The problem is that all too often, they are used incorrectly; sometimes both tabs and spaces are used for indentation, or a tab character is used to indent to a specific character position. In these cases, I'm forced to try different tab spacings until I find the "right" one.
Larry