From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2005-03-23T09:41:58+09:00
Subject: Re: Any guides for good coding in Ruby? [OT] tabs vs. spaces

Sam Roberts wrote:
> That's funny, I haven't found that emacs uses spaces to indent by
> default. Its supposed to default to the GNU coding standard, though what
> it does on any machine is pretty subject to the whims of who installed
> it. The emacs standard/GNU indent style is the weirdest around, IMO.

Yeah, I don't like its default behaviour.  I very rarely use emacs 
without a .emacs file that overrides this.  It's pretty easy:

In your .emacs file:

(setq indent-tabs-mode nil)

Or from within emacs: "M-x customize-option" "indent-tabs-mode" and 
choose off (nil).

Or at any point for a given session: "M-x set-variable" 
"indent-tabs-mode" "nil"

> I'm averse to indents over about 4, and I think tabs are lame. They work
> fine if everybody on your team uses the same settings, but when anybody
> else looks at your code, it will look bad.

Or when you look at it in a web browser, which can't (afaik) be 
customized, etc. etc.

> I think a bunch or ruby core developers (matz, for one) use emacs, so
> many of the files use tabs, and indent two char widths per nesting
> level. Not all, though.

Maybe if we keep this off-topic thread going long enough they'll fix 
their editors just to shut us up.

Ben