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Everyone has their own opinions about how much visual indentation they want in their code. Some prefer 2 spaces, some prefer 4, and then some users may be visually impaired and need higher font sizes with smaller tab widths, etc.
There's been a tonne of debate over the years about which is better, and it's always come to down to arguments that are opinion based, but the one major and consequential difference between the two is this:
Tabs allow individuals in the same codebase to select their indentation widths across every tool.
Prettier is likely to switch to useTabs by default with the next major version too, for this exact reason: prettier/prettier#7475
And other linters/formatters like Biome have already recognised this and default to hard tabs.
Other than the obvious code change differences, shipping an .editorconfig in this repo for some sensible defaults would probably be a good idea too, to combat one of the most common counters to this, which is how some tools render tabs by default. This way, tools like GitHub can render tabs with a 4 character width by default instead of the usual 8, but folks can still customise this themselves if they so choose. Something like this:
Everyone has their own opinions about how much visual indentation they want in their code. Some prefer 2 spaces, some prefer 4, and then some users may be visually impaired and need higher font sizes with smaller tab widths, etc.
There's been a tonne of debate over the years about which is better, and it's always come to down to arguments that are opinion based, but the one major and consequential difference between the two is this:
Tabs allow individuals in the same codebase to select their indentation widths across every tool.
To affirm the accessibility issue, I'd recommend reading through https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_talks_about_the_real_reason_to_use_tabs/:
Other references:
Prettier is likely to switch to
useTabs
by default with the next major version too, for this exact reason: prettier/prettier#7475And other linters/formatters like Biome have already recognised this and default to hard tabs.
Other than the obvious code change differences, shipping an
.editorconfig
in this repo for some sensible defaults would probably be a good idea too, to combat one of the most common counters to this, which is how some tools render tabs by default. This way, tools like GitHub can render tabs with a 4 character width by default instead of the usual 8, but folks can still customise this themselves if they so choose. Something like this:I'd like to avoid any debate around personal preference here and focus on the accessibility issue of continuing to indent code with spaces. Prior art:
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