Showing posts with label indent. Show all posts
Showing posts with label indent. Show all posts

Wednesday, 7 December 2016

4 space indent vs 2 space indent

Some developers like 4 spaces for the indent and some like 2 spaces. Originally I preferred 2 spaces, but ended up working for a company that insisted on 4 spaces, which is understandable to keep code consistent. And after using a 4 space indent for 5 years I actually prefer it for the following reasons:
  1. I find it makes the code more readable.
  2. Highlights when there is a lot of nested code, that might or should be refactored.
  3. It is consistent with C#, I know you can also change the number of spaces for tabs in C#, but 2 spaces in C# looks wrong to me.
I think this also raises the question on whether to use tabs or spaces, personally I don't mind and the fact that in Delphi you can set the number of spaces for tabs seems to get around the argument that people have that tabs take 1 key press. In reality I think that if a developer is actually pressing the space bar twice to indent or even 4 times, they are making life hard for themselves and should think about pressing 'CTRL' + 'D' to automatically format the code. I cannot see any argument for not using the auto format as long as all the developers on the team have the same configuration, else it does become a bit of a nightmare with source control.