This post is about the thing in the title. I used to work for Yelp. For historical reasons — probably “the initial developers preferred it” — their mostly-Python codebase had always been indented with tabs. That’s in stark contrast to the vast majority of the Python ecosystem, which generally uses the standard library’s style guide recommendation of four spaces. The presence of tabs caused occasional minor headaches and grumbles
Every single time I’ve tried to work on a file using tabs, I’ve had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I’ve yet to see it work well.
(For what it’s worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)
Every single time I’ve tried to work on a file using tabs, I’ve had to configure my tabstop to be the same width the original author used in order to make the formatting reasonable. I understand that in theory customizable tabstops is preferable, but I’ve yet to see it work well.
(For what it’s worth, I think that elastic tabstops, had they been the way tabs worked in text files to begin with, would have been far preferable.)