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As someone who, despite being 24 years old, learned to type on a (mechanical!) typewriter, I don't like tab for indentation on the basis that, for me, tabs have
by reginaldo 15y ago
As someone who, despite being 24 years old, learned to type on a (mechanical!) typewriter, I don't like tab for indentation on the basis that, for me, tabs have a very specific meaning:
Carriage (or cursor, if you prefer), go to the next tab stop. [2]
For typewriters it means to go "literally" to where the next stop is. For text editors (at least for emacs)[1], it means to insert as many spaces as needed so the next column on the current line matches with the last non-space column on the previous line.
So, in the same way I use the table tag for tabular data in markup, I use the tab key for tabular text.
[1] http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html http://www.jwz.org/doc/tabs-vs-spaces.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key#Origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_key#Origin
- pavel_lishin 15y agoIf we're talking emacs, you can configure it to do whatever you want. So no, it does not always mean "insert spaces until the next tab stop".
- LearnYouALisp 15y agoWas this an electro-mechanical typewriter or a purely mechanical one?
- reginaldo 15y agoI started on a purely mechanical, but then, as the course progressed, changed to an electro-mechanical one.