Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code
Since the days of the character mapped display, programmers have argued over whether tabs or spaces should be used to line up text. While both strategies can be used if all of a project’s programmers can agree on how many spaces wide a tab should be, experience has taught us that this is not always the case. Even if all of the programmers working on a project are diligent enough to stick to only using tabs or spaces and have tabs set to the agreed number of spaces, there is still a problem if any programmers wish to use modern proportional fonts (because a space is no longer the same width as every other character).
The reason why we have not yet settled conclusively on either tabs or spaces is that both camps can point to problems in the others’ approach. The truth is that both are right to be critical