Is it better to use spaces or tabs?

The analysis performed by the team at Stack Overflow found that programmers who use spaces instead of tabs are making more money. David Robinson, the data scientist who performed this study found that programmers using space over tabs made an average of 9 percent more each year than their tab using counterparts.

How many spaces is a tab equivalent to?

Generally, a tab is the same width as 4 to 5 spaces provided the font being used equally sizes each character. For example, the Courier font’s tab equals 5 spaces, whereas the Arial font is 11 spaces to each tab when the font size for both is set to 12.

Is tab 4 a space?

Answer. In most code editors, tabs are not the same as 2 spaces or 4 spaces by default. A tab is stored differently than spaces in the code. Tabs can be seen as a big “jump” in the text, while spaces are always 1 space each.

What does spaces tab mean?

“Spaces,” reads one argument. “A tab could be a different number of columns depending on your environment, but a space is always one column.” “Tabs,” reads the counter argument. “ They’re a character specifically meant for indentation.

Why would anyone use spaces over tabs?

If a couple of people work on same file it is highly possible to generate unnecessary conflicts. Using spaces instead of tabs makes it possible to easily catch such an accidental space on eyeball and this is probably a reason, why using them become a standard.

Why do python tabs have spaces?

Spaces are the preferred indentation method. Tabs should be used solely to remain consistent with code that is already indented with tabs. Python disallows mixing tabs and spaces for indentation.

Why is tab space so big?

Please try the following: Press Ctrl + A to select all the content in your document. Then go to Format > Align & indent > Indentation options. In the “Indentation options” panel, make sure the box for “Left” is zero and “Special” is either “None” or the first line is set to 0.5.

How do you indent without using tab?

Don’t use Tab to indent paragraphs in a Word document

  1. From the Format menu, choose Paragraph.
  2. Click the Indents And Spacing tab.
  3. In the Indention section, select First Line from the Special control’s drop-down list.
  4. Specify the size of the indention using the By control’s drop-down list.

Do tabs take less space than spaces?

Conclusion. So, at the end of the day, tabs versus spaces is truly a matter of preference, however the tab is still the character specifically designed for indentation, and using one tab character per indentation level instead of 2 or 4 spaces will use less disk space / memory / compiler resources and the like.

How many spaces is a tab in C?

8 spaces
When using tabs it’s important to keep in mind that tab characters represent the number of characters until the next 8 character tab stop. Sometimes we can approximate this idea by saying that tabs are equal to 8 spaces.

Why are spaces better than tabs Python?

Spaces are the preferred indentation method. Tabs should be used solely to remain consistent with code that is already indented with tabs. Python 3 disallows mixing the use of tabs and spaces for indentation.

Why is a tab 8 spaces?

1 Answer. Because the default tab size in Linux console is 8 spaces, and therefore most CLI text editors in Linux also default to 8 spaces. Most are also configurable, but it’s been the default for ages.

What’s the difference between a tab and a space?

“A tab could be a different number of columns depending on your environment, but a space is always one column.” “Tabs,” reads the counter argument. “They’re a character specifically meant for indentation. They allow developers with different preferences in indentation size to change how the code looks without changing the code”

Do you use two spaces or two tabs for indentation?

This question and its answers are locked because the question is off-topic but has historical significance. It is not currently accepting new answers or interactions. The coding standards for the code hosted in drupal.org suggest to use two spaces to indent the code; other sites suggest to use tabs to indent the code.

How to use 4 space tabs in Python?

Convert all your leading space-tabs to tabs, set the tab size to four, and then convert leading tabs back to space-tabs. Pretty easy to do with a python script too. Just count all the leading spaces, then add the same amount to the beginning of the line and write it back out.

Why do I use spaces over tabs in Excel?

Tabs with 2 char widths Below is the same example as above, but optimized for a 2 character width tab. The exact same problem applies, but you can also see that it takes a different number of tabs to produce similar alignments. 1234 Tabs for block indent only