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And yet these visually impaired people apparently pleaded with the OP not to take away their tabs. Almost every program to edit text has a tab stop setting, bu

And yet these visually impaired people apparently pleaded with the OP not to take away their tabs. Almost every program to edit text has a tab stop setting, but only the most advanced dev tools allow you the same control over spaces. Anecdotally, I’ve been struggling to get emacs to indent a certain language correctly for me (I want it to use two spaces in a place where it only uses one, I’m not really an emacs person so figuring out how to fix it is too much effort for me), if I were to switch to tabs, that would be easy: just set the tab width and be done with it. I don’t have any experience with screen readers, but it would seem to me that they should have an easier time with tabs too.

prepend 7y ago
I wish the story had described the editors used by the two visually impaired coders. It seems odd that they are using an environment that doesn’t up/down convert easily. It mentioned they were forced to do this like it was a manual process. Free IDEs like VScode do this, and it works with screen readers. Although from the description of their screens with large fonts and wide resolutions, I don’t think they were using screen readers. Since the article is missing this bit, I can’t help that fear that all three would have benefited from knowing how to config editors to get around this problem.
- scrollaway 7y ago
  No IDE I know of can reliably convert spaces to tabs in a display mode only (= without actually causing code changes).
  - dkersten 7y ago
    Also, not every space necessarily should be converted to tabs, especially if you follow the “tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment” mentality: you will want everything up to the indentation level converted but not everything after. I’m sure some editors can do this, but many also definitely can’t. Tabs just work, everywhere.
  - organsnyder 7y ago
    This seems like something that could be resolved with a couple of git hooks: post-merge: Reformat code based on local developer preference. pre-commit: (1) Reformat code back to repository standard. (2) Revert changes that are solely whitespace-related. I'm not aware of a tool that would do the last step automatically, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to implement. And perhaps (I haven't checked) git has a built-in config option to alter how it behaves for whitespace-only changes?
  - colordrops 7y ago
    There is no need to convert though. Vim for instance can work with spaces as if they were tabs.
  - prepend 7y ago
    I’ve had success with vscode converting spaces to tabs and vice versa between open and save. Knock on wood, I haven’t had it bungle any code. I do this because some projects like tabs, some like 2 spaces, some like 4 spaces and I like coding in a particular way that’s independent of the particular projects.

prepend 7y ago

I wish the story had described the editors used by the two visually impaired coders. It seems odd that they are using an environment that doesn’t up/down convert easily. It mentioned they were forced to do this like it was a manual process. Free IDEs like VScode do this, and it works with screen readers. Although from the description of their screens with large fonts and wide resolutions, I don’t think they were using screen readers. Since the article is missing this bit, I can’t help that fear that all three would have benefited from knowing how to config editors to get around this problem.

scrollaway 7y ago
No IDE I know of can reliably convert spaces to tabs in a display mode only (= without actually causing code changes).
- dkersten 7y ago
  Also, not every space necessarily should be converted to tabs, especially if you follow the “tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment” mentality: you will want everything up to the indentation level converted but not everything after. I’m sure some editors can do this, but many also definitely can’t. Tabs just work, everywhere.
- organsnyder 7y ago
  This seems like something that could be resolved with a couple of git hooks: post-merge: Reformat code based on local developer preference. pre-commit: (1) Reformat code back to repository standard. (2) Revert changes that are solely whitespace-related. I'm not aware of a tool that would do the last step automatically, but it doesn't seem like it would be too hard to implement. And perhaps (I haven't checked) git has a built-in config option to alter how it behaves for whitespace-only changes?
- colordrops 7y ago
  There is no need to convert though. Vim for instance can work with spaces as if they were tabs.
- prepend 7y ago
  I’ve had success with vscode converting spaces to tabs and vice versa between open and save. Knock on wood, I haven’t had it bungle any code. I do this because some projects like tabs, some like 2 spaces, some like 4 spaces and I like coding in a particular way that’s independent of the particular projects.