Visual Studio 2010 Forces Tab Indenting

An anonymous reader writes "For years, Microsoft has allowed Visual Studio users to define arbitrary tab widths, often to the dismay of those viewing the resultant code in other editors. With VS 2010, it appears that they have taken the next step of forcing tab width to be the same as the indent size in code. Two-space tabs anyone?"

Comments

This is news at any level how?

[Foredecker]

This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didnt? Windows 7 way hotter than Vista off the line, now more popular than all OS X versions. Okay then...

How is this tab things news or interesting at all? Here is what Brittany Behrens a PM for the editor team said:

Hi Brien,

Thank you for logging this issue. Before making this change we solicited feedback on the decision to combine Tab Size and Indent Size from a wide variety of sources, including public blog posts and forum threads, and found that the vast majority of user feedback was in favor of combining the two. If its seriously impacting your code to have Tab Size always equal Indent Size, it is possible to write a short editor extension to override the Tools->Options dialog and set the two options separately. If thats something youd be interested in, please let me know and Ill see about posting sample code for how to do this.

Im resolving this issue as By Design because we intentionally combined these options for VS 2010, but please feel free to post again here if you have any further questions or comments and well be happy to help.

Thanks for trying Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and sending your feedback!

Brittany Behrens

Program Manager, VS Platform - Editor

(bolding above mine for emphasis)

Gee, the team solicited comments, did some research and made a change that people wanted. Of course, any change will make somebody unhappy.

Brittany even volunteered to give folks a simple editor extension to make the settings different for those that want it. My assumption is that anyone using Visual Studio is a developer and capeable of using such an extension, or writing it themselves. It is not difficult.

-Foredecker

Re:This is news at any level how?

[black3d]

This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didnt?

Windows 7 way hotter than Vista off the line, now more popular than all OS X
versions

It's kdawson's shift. He'll never post any article that's even mildly favorable of anything Microsoft related. However, if you can find a story that says some kid in Sweden doesn't like the Windows 7 box-colors, you've got yourself a kdawson front-pager! :)

Re:This is news at any level how?

[Wumpus]

No.

They solicited input from each other and in a blog post that generated a handful of responses. They did this to eliminate "a class of bugs" in the new editor that was triggered by setting the two numbers to different values. Which means they had a bunch of bugs (probably due to confusion between the two settings in the code) and someone had the brilliant idea that the bugs will go away if they just crippled the editor in such a way that the bugs will never be triggered. They solicited input, very quietly, and did it. This also means that the workaround they offer (writing a fucking extension, for fucking crying out loud - what is this, emacs?) will trigger all those bugs because they didn't fix them.

Idiots.

Re:This is news at any level how?

[Rogerborg]

That's a very unfair characterisation; there's much more to kdawson than just Microsoft bashing. Specifically, if you have some shitty snake oil vapourware that you'd like to peddle by shilling an advert thinly disguised as an article, he's your guy.

Re:Why put tabs in code anyway?

[mgkimsal2]

They're a meta character, and the meaning can be changed later.

* If I'm hitting the tab key and it's inserting X spaces, and I hit the key once too many times, I have to hit delete X times instead of just once.

* If the code is reused in a new environment where everyone wants their indentation levels at 4 spaces instead of 2 or 3 or 8, you have to reformat a lot of code manually. If tabs are used, remap the sizing of the tab character and you're done.

* The tab character itself has some semantic meaning - indent. The space is a word and symbol separator. Use an indentation character when you want to indicate indentation.

Re:Why put tabs in code anyway?

[yvajj]

The biggest benefit to tabs (especially if you code in a corporate environment) is that people can view the code based on *their* preferred indentation / spacing e,.g. I may like my tabs to be 2 spaces, another developer may prefer 3 or 4 spaces.

By setting up their IDE / editor to their preferred tab width, the code indents to the way they like it.

By forcing all your tabs to be spaces, anyone else viewing the code will be forced to view / edit it in your indentation.

Re:Why put tabs in code anyway?

[nmb3000]

So, for all those tab fans, what is it about tabs that you find useful?

1. I can have my indent be 2 spaces and you can have it be 8 spaces, all without changing the source code.
2. Files are not constantly being changed and updated in the source control system due to the number of spaces changing as different developers edit the code.
3. If I want to print out a section of code, I can modify the tab/space equivalency so that the lines easily fit on the page without wrapping.
4. Tabs provide a one-to-one relationship between the level of indentation and the number of characters used. This isn't usually a big deal, but in terms of parsing and editing I personally find this more elegant than using spaces (an inconsistent many-to-one relationship).
5. It saves electrons. One tab character generally fills the shoes of four space characters. That's a savings of 75%! Smaller storage and transmission requirements means fewer servers in the datacenter which means less heat created which means smaller refrigeration units which means less energy consumed which means fewer greenhouse gases emitted which means less global warming which means continued survival of the human species.

So there you go. In addition to just being more manageable and flexible, using tabs over spaces will help ensure the future existence of the human species on this planet.

Okay, so while the last point was in jest (mostly ;), I stand by the first four. Honestly, I've yet to see any pro-spaces people give any substantial reasons (when applied to modern computers and development tools) that spaces work better than tabs.

So, for all those space fans, what is it about spaces that you find useful?

Re:Why put tabs in code anyway?

[harryjohnston]

I find the use of spaces irritating and stupid, to be equally blunt. I mean, the tab is a character that exists _specifically_ for aligning text. It behaves predictably across editors [...]

Not in my experience it doesn't!

You never have to worry about half indents choking the editor.

I don't understand what you mean by this.

Why replace tabs with spaces? So you can hit the space bar a thousand times whenever you need to edit something outside a programming editor?

Ironically, one of the reasons I prefer to use spaces is so that the code is readable when I do want to edit (or view) something outside of the programming editor. Code with tabs in it is usually completely messed up.

Ah, well, it'd be a funny old world if we were all the same!

Re:Why put tabs in code anyway?

[nmb3000]

I know it's bad form to reply to yourself, but really Slashdot? THAT is how you render an HTML ordered list? What blind, drunk monkey on an acid trip designed that stylesheet?

Of course the icing on the cake is that in the preview it was properly rendered as an ordered numeric list. WTF, Taco?

Oh, look at the name of the CSS files responsible: idlecore-tidied.css. Makes sense now I suppose. Anything to do with idle.slashdot is already horribly broken.

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