I’d say that one’s approaching resolution, too. And 4 has won.

According to the table in the article there are more languages with a recommended value of 2 than languages with 4. I'm using 2 for Ruby and 4 for Python. I don't remember what I'm using for JavaScript, maybe the same value of the main language of the project.

	▲	Jensson 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You should really use 3 since obviously people want a bit more than 2 and a bit less than 4. I use 3 for that reason, as I was most productive at 3. At 2 I don't get an overview easily enough, at 4 indents start to creep too far out making it hard to work in larger functions. 3 is really the smallest number where I still easily saw the big picture structure of a file, so I feel that is the optimal one, at 2 I start to not be able to eyeball how indented a piece of code is. Not sure why people are so obsessed with having power of 2 spaces, can anyone explain that? Why argue over 2 vs 4 when you can have 3 for everything? I think 4 is better than 2 since 2 is too hard to track, but 3 obviously is better than 4.

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frizlab a day ago | parent | prev [-]

I use tab at three. And will do to the day I die.

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rimunroe a day ago | parent | next [-]

A friend of mine worked at a place which used three column indents and now I’m fully converted

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ben_w a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Sometimes I remember a workplace system I used, where someone had set tabs to 8 space.

I don't know why it was 8, but it was.

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PlunderBunny a day ago | parent | next [-]

The VAX/VMS terminals we used at university to learn Pascal defaulted to 8 space tabs, on a 80 column screen. That certainly pushed some people towards using spaces.

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1718627440 a day ago | parent [-]

I use 8-sized tabs with 72 columns in C. The human eye doesn't like moving all that much while reading and more windows fit one the screen even if it is annotated with git blame. In addition there is this argument from Torvalds, that you should mind your maximum nesting in a single function, which I also find useful.

	▲	Jensson 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> In addition there is this argument from Torvalds, that you should mind your maximum nesting in a single function, which I also find useful. Note that nesting is a much bigger issue in a language like C where you have to clean up after yourself, in most languages having a lot of nesting in a function isn't an issue.

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g-b-r a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It's how they've been interpreted forever on Unix and other old systems

It's probably the main reason why they're so controversial.

	▲	kbelder 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Which was influenced by tab stops on typewriters... which were adjustable, but were generally set at 1/2", 3/4", or 1"... which was the equivalent to 5-12 characters, depending on your font (monospaced, but sometimes 10 cpi, sometimes 12 cpi).