Elastic Tab Stops (2017)

I think a more ideal solution would be to achieve the flexibility of elastic TabStops without having to actually change the way it's represented under the hood. My conviction from personal experience is that your personal tools need to be adaptable to fit any organization. This splits largely along tech stack culture lines. Our shop was originally Ruby before we started moving to NodeJS, we all use spaces for indentation. So unless I want to force my whole team to…

> Rather than saying that a tab character places the text that follows it at the next Nth column, we should say that a tab character is a delimiter between table cells in a manner more reminiscent of how they're used in tab separated value (TSV) files. When used for text or code I call this format "Tab Separated Columns". Seen in this light, we can see that space aligned files are analogous to the old fixed width data files…

While this would be nice, I find that the value it adds is very low. I've settled on tabs for indent and spaces for alignment. And over the years I've found that I do less and less alignment and that is is rarely benificial. The biggest problem is that it creates noisy diffs when you add or remove the longest element in a group, and that would be resolved by elastic tabstops. But I also don't see much value in…

Discussions in 2018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17643629 2008 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=333626