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> I want to arrest any misconception that us Tabbers would do anything as nonsensical as using our precious variable-width tab-stop chars for anything like column-aligning identifiers: we don't.

The irony is that this is exactly what tab characters are used for. Have you wondered why they're called tabs? Because they're used for tabulation, making tables. They are intended for aligning columns in a table. Not for indentation.

I'm so happy that languages like Go have formatting tools that sidestep all these pointless discussions. :)

We aren't using typewriters anymore.

Word processors still use tabs for that purpose.

What ones?

MS Word uses XML in docx.

We were talking about typewriters, which don't have a file format at all. Nevertheless, it might not be stored as ASCII code 9 in Word anymore (though it originally did), but it is entered and behaves like a tab stop on a typewriter, and is called a tab character: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat....

I personally agree with this, but a lot of the tools out there break this easily. I'm curious if you have any tools that handle the formatting like this properly. I've written my own tool that will report invalid whitespace when following this, but it can't fix any of it automatically. The commonly used clang-format also messes up this scheme as it will convert alignment space to tabs.

I'll admit that I spend most of my time in Visual Studio which supports my preferences very well, including my .editorconfig (which is now the .editorconfig for my entire org... it's almost as if good ideas have a following ;)

I do understand the appeal and advantages of having automated+opinionated re-formatting as part of a gated check-in process, because it's about having a normalized and consistent representation in the canonical repo; the idea being that you'd have a git-hook that would apply your own preferred formatting style on checkout which would be undone on commit; alas, we're not quite there yet.

...but having a single, normalized format (even if everyone hates it for different reasons) is the reason why gofmt and clang-format stick to spaces. I remember (back in 2017) being forced to submit to gofmt's dominion over my code and it ruining my beautifully aligned mass-assignments - and in my frustration I complained about this on StackOverflow and almost immediately someone replied with a working solution: use C-style comments to "protect" whitespace from being mangled by gofmt, see here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46940772/how-can-i-use-g...

Also, apparently clang-format now supports tabs with some hoops: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/69135590/how-make-clang-... - does that work for you?

I'm mainly in Visual Studio at my job as well, I was more asking for my personal projects since at work the issue has been "solved." Sadly the clang-format stuff doesn't work, while it looks like it supports tabs on the surface all those settings do (at least last I used it a year or 2 ago) is convert all of the tabs to spaces, do all the formatting it typically does, and then convert all x number of spaces back to tabs if they're at the beginning of the line. Effectively converting all the alignment spaces to tabs (leaving a few spaces at the end if it's not an even multiple.)

My tool at this point basically just has a bunch of rules like,

  1) if tab indentation changes, spaces for alignment aren't allowed
  2) tab indentation can never be off by more than 1 of the prior line

Also flags cases of trailing whitespace and I believe tabs not at the beginning of a line. Still debating how I'd like to handle fully spaced files as my current program reports no errors in that case, maybe just throw a warning somewhere that the file looks suspicious.

Sir, you are way out of alignment. Detabulate immediately.