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Comment by godshatter | Hacker News Reader

I'm still in the "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" camp. If you adhere to it, it makes your code look nice on any tab size.

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For a solo project, sure, you do you. But for any meaningful collaboration, deliberately mixing tabs and spaces - and relying on a manual, semantic convention to use them the "right" way - will inevitably lead to a maintenance / consistency nightmare.

To add to your comment, it's kinda common to find projects that have spaces and tabs improperly mixed in the indentation. Making a quick search among the projects I have cloned, I'm seeing indentations like

  tab * 4 + space * 7 + tab * 2
  tab * 2 + space * 1 + tab * 1
  tab * 1 + space * 4 + tab * 2
  space * 16 + tab * 3 + space * 4
  tab * 4 + space * 2 + tab * 2 + space * 2
  tab * 3 + space * 3 + tab * 1 + space * 6

The code ends up looking janked unless you use the particular tab-width of the space/tab-indenter[1], which isn't always 8. It completely defeats the whole purpose of the tab indentation.

[1] On those first 2, given the odd (not even) number of spaces, it's likely that use of spaces was for alignment, but then a tab-indenter added tabs to that...

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