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?

[cgenman]

This tab thing makes Slashdot front page and the following didn't?

Of course the tab thing made Slashdot front page. Some people here virtually LIVE in Visual Studio, and code indentation is a heavily entrenched basic function of coding that people get surprisingly fired up about. Even if this particular aspect of code indentation isn't going to effect people, it's just begging for a heated emacs level discussion.

Your article, on the other hand, basically confirms that people like Windows 7 more than Vista, and that Windows 7 continues the well known and understood tradition of Windows outselling OSX by a factor of 10 to 1. These are things we already knew. Also, the article you site isn't even the source of the information, but refers to a much better Ars Technica article, which itself gets the data from Net Applications. I wonder if you didn't link the Ars Technica article directly because it claims that "Linux was the only operating system [in December] to show positive percentage growth in market share." Or maybe this one "When putting this into perspective across the whole year, though, we see that Windows was actually sliding steadily throughout 2009 (93.66 percent in January 2009), while both Mac OS (4.71 percent in January 2009) and Linux (0.90 percent in January 2009) have been gaining." Or maybe the fact that Windows XP continues to hold onto 2/3rds of the active Windows installbase.

Also, it might be nice to point out that you're work at Microsoft in the Windows org as a development manger. It would boost your credibility as a poster, and reduce potential conflicts of interest.

Tabs vs. Spaces

[dziman]

FIGHT!

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.

Anyone, anyone?

[Blakey Rat]

Ending sentence fragments with anyone, anyone? Does anyone like this convention, anyone? Can we just see it die horribly in flames, anyone?

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?