Re: VIM config in PEAR files?

> printf("%s", > $arg); > ^^^^^^^ > This is 7 spaces. That's one 4-space tab and 3 spaces. If displayed in > some editor that has 8-space tabs by default, it will look like this: So, why not just use 7 spaces for that case? Tabs are not for formatting, but for indenting. If you wanted to indent this code, do this: printf("%s", ^^^^^^^$arg); > print("%s", > $arg); > > Ditto with tabbed code written in an 8-space-tab editor viewed with > 4-space tabs: > > > if (foo && > bar) { > } > > Will look like this: > > if (foo && > bar) { > } It's the same straw argument. That is no reason to ban tabs entirely, just a reason to not use tabs incorrectly. Both of these examples illustrate a common mistake when using tabs that they are used to align text to other text. This is not true. Tabs are only useful for indenting blocks of code that are only aligned to the same block. Using tabs to align to characters in a previous line is silly. > In an environment like PEAR where people use lots of different editors, > using tabs simply doesn't work. People will end up doing whitespace > commits fixing rendering in their editor, while breaking it for others. > Without tabs it will look the same to everyone. It doesn't work when people do not follow consistent conventions. That is something to be contested. > Diff and less are tools that programmers use, so that argument is just > bogus. Aren't we discussing this for the sake of programmers? Anyway, less has a configurable tab-widths and diff has options to work-around your problem. From less's man page: -xn or --tabs=n Sets tab stops every n positions. The default for n is 8. From diff's man page: --expand-tabs Expand tabs to spaces in the output, to preserve the alignment of tabs in the input files. --initial-tab Output a tab rather than a space before the text of a line in normal or context format. This causes the alignment of tabs in the line to look normal. - Brent