Tools: Hard Tabs

[jamiebuilds]

People are allowed to have opinions on how much visual indentation they want in their code. When I first started coding I found 4-space indentation to be really helpful when I would easily get lost in my code. After a few years I preferred 2-spaces. So there is an argument to be made about accessibility.

People have debated endlessly about tabs vs spaces, and ultimately most of people's opinions are just a bit silly. There is only one consequential difference between the two:

Tabs allow individuals in the same codebase to select their indentation widths across every tool (yes including GitHub using either the .editorconfig or a user-style with tab-size), and spaces do not (at least not across every tool).

As such, I think we should switch to hard tabs for everything in Rome.

I'm gonna make a request that people refrain from flooding this thread with subjective opinions about if 2-space width code is better than 4-space width code. You are welcome to have your personal preference, that is the entire reason for choosing hard tabs.

[sebmck]

One change I'm going to work on now is making sure that tabs render correctly in buildMessageCodeFrame. We should render \t as and make sure the pointer aligns.

[jamiebuilds]

Just to confirm the accessibility issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/c8drjo/nobody_talks_about_the_real_reason_to_use_tabs/

coworkers who unfortunately are highly visually impaired, and each has a different visual impairment:

• one of them uses tab-width 1 because he uses such a gigantic font-size
• the other uses tab-width 8 and a really wide monitor
• these guys have serious problems using codebases with spaces, they have to convert, do their work, and then unconvert before committing

[diokey]

Thank you for sharing this. I had never thought/considered the accessibility concerns of using spaces

[sebmck]

Merged #439. I'll make the indentation change once I've merged the outstanding PRs.

[sebmck]

Opened #443 to switch us to hard tabs. I also opened #442 to discuss switching to double quotes.