Tabs v/s Spaces: An analysis on why tabs are better
&quot;So these are my pro-Tabs reasons. You might think some of them as BS but they are rational and you can’t disagree with that.&quot;.  I disagree.<p>&quot;1. Tabs are meant for Indentation&quot;.<p>On typewriters, yes.  For the beginning of a paragraph, yes.  But for programming? No.  Why would you mix a character of undefined length (a tab) with characters of defined length (all other printable characters, including the space character)?<p>&quot;2. Tab-based indentation is uniform, like spaces&quot;<p>No, it&#x27;s not.  It changes from editor to editor.  Some editors make it easy to change the tab size representation, and some make it difficult.  When reading someone else&#x27;s code, you have to change your tab size to whatever their tab setting was if you want comments to line up correctly.  The real headache comes when you are trying to use code from one or more outside sources, and they both used different tab sizes.  It makes reading the code a chore.<p>I will say it plainly: Code (higher level languages) is for the ease of understanding of the programmer.  Anything that gets in the way of that, including weird spacing, is wrong.<p>&quot;3. Tabs work better with Notepad&quot;<p>The last time I checked, the space bar works just fine in Notepad.  &quot;Oh,&quot; you may say, &quot;I don&#x27;t want to have to push the space bar that many times!  It&#x27;s hard!&quot;.  Really?!?  That&#x27;s just being lazy.  I prefer <i>not</i> to use auto-indenting because it makes me more aware of the flow of my code.  In fact, most of the time it gets in the way, as it does not do the indentation that I want, and I don&#x27;t care to spend the time to figure out what obscure setting that I need to tweak to fix it; I have more important things to do!  For context, I&#x27;ve been programming for 20 years now.<p>&quot;4. Code size with tabs indentation is lesser&quot;<p>Why does that matter?  Code is for programmers.  Compiled versions are for computers.  The compiled version does not change regardless of the form of whitespace used.  For modern computers, quibbling over source code size (especially when it is only a few kilobytes) is like complaining because there is a sheet of paper taking up room in a shopping basket.  It&#x27;s negligible.<p>&quot;5. Spaces Indentation takes more time to fix&quot;<p>Most IDEs have tools that address this exact issue.  I, however, don&#x27;t use them, and it doesn&#x27;t impact my output volume.  These types of changes (refactoring, really) are few and far between, and therefore make it sound like you are grasping at straws.<p>&quot;6. Spaces promote super-ugly &amp; inefficient code style&quot;<p>Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and you yourself are advocating a style that I think is harder to read.  I will choose the spaces version, thank you very much.