In the 90s, when I used various text editors like Ultraedit, Nedit, Pico, Nano, Vi, and my co-workers used Dreamweaver, Visual C++, Visual Basic, NetBeans

I was in the "TABs are superior" camp but only for the initial indention of code blocks.

But somewhere along the way, editors added features that let you see invisibles, and let you set up smart tabs so that you could hit tab, but it would interpolate 4 spaces (or whatever you set) into the document, and let you shift+tab back the indention or TAB the indention, but put in spaces.

More importantly, the mass of people who all coalesced on using the same editor in the web development sphere, Sublime then Atom then MS Visual Studio Code, has made it easier to just say "set your editor to do this".

I have changed my mind to using SPACES now because the editor lets me fake using TABS.

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frizlab a day ago | parent | next [-]

Navigation is still more painful with spaces than with tabs.

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DrSiemer a day ago | parent [-]

Not if you learn to use the right shortcuts for it (ctrl+arrows, mostly).

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frizlab a day ago | parent | next [-]

I know the shortcuts. (It’s not ctrl-arrows; ctrl-arrows is to switch Space.)

There are still situations where it’s annoying, mostly when navigating the code using the arrow, moving from one location to another using the arrows, I won’t add a key modifier right in the middle of moving the cursor, it just doesn't make sense.

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DrSiemer 15 hours ago | parent [-]

Switch space? On any Windows OS ctrl-arrows (left and right) move the cursor by word. I don't exactly understand how people work with code or even do text editing without it.

	▲	frizlab 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’m on macOS and it’s alt-space. Ctrl-space moves the cursor by “words inside words,” e.g. in theBestVariable, will go between “the” and “Best.” However it conflicts with the system ctrl-space that switch space. Not really an issue, because ctrl-shift-arrow will do the same word inside word move, but extending selection. In the end we can select until the desired location is reached, then hit a single left or right arrow to deselect and we’re there.

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TZubiri 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You are pushing a lot of complexity to the editor here. Whereas with tabs you can uninstall a lot of garbage and link your keyboard directly with the binary representation of your code.

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efilife 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

So it's the same as using tabs but you are actually using spaces for no real reason?