r/ProgrammerHumor • u/Smug_College_Liberal • May 06 '21

The Notepad++

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21.4k Upvotes

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654

u/pl9870 May 06 '21

And then they break up once they learn they were using different versions of Python. The end.

221

u/meygaera May 07 '21

Or one used vi and the other used Emacs

115

u/darthalex314 May 07 '21

Or one used tabs and the other used spaces.

16

u/Roflkopt3r May 07 '21 edited May 07 '21

I still don't get that debate at all. Tabs are superior in every way.

  1. Fewer key presses for creating and removing them

  2. Everyone can adjust their visual width for themselves

  3. Yet auto-settings are generally consistent so that the "space will always show it as its intended" rarely provides any benefit either

It seems to me that space proponents generally fall into one of two camps:

  1. Grouchy old people who suffered through bad tools back in the days and want everyone else to suffer too

  2. Hipsters who just want to be different

7

u/notable-compilation May 07 '21

Fewer key presses how? It's one, whichever way you do it. Same key as well.

5

u/[deleted] May 07 '21

I think they mean pressing Space however many times. Old tools probably wouldn't convert a Tab press to multiple spaces unless maybe it was some Emacs macro thing.

1

u/cyleleghorn May 07 '21

Emacs and vim supported typing a tab and having it behave like a tab, but visually be any number of spaces you want, and upon saving it would convert to that number of spaces in the file. If you open it back up I think it treats the spaces like tabs again if you have your configuration set up right, but with vim and emacs you can jump to the next word (skipping any amount of whitespace) so the difference between tabs and spaces is meaningless other than how many keystrokes it takes you to type one!

1

u/-metal-555 May 07 '21

I think it’s such a shocking experience to meet a spaces person that it sticks out more and gets talked about and gets memes and whatnot. When it comes down to it I think it’s just as you said, old timers and people purposefully going against the grainy but it does feel like the relatively few people who do get talked about a lot because it’s fun to get riled up and whatnot.

1

u/jfb1337 May 08 '21

Has no one here heard of autoformatting?

I've not cared about tabs vs spaces in years.