3 ms·

These are all good points. I'm curious: if you were starting an open source project and you wanted to make contributing as seamless an experience as possible,

by atroche 14y ago

These are all good points. I'm curious: if you were starting an open source project and you wanted to make contributing as seamless an experience as possible, would you still use tabs for indentation? As for coding in a proportional font, I've never even heard of that before. I'm tempted to try it just for a day, to see if I can get over the initial revulsion. Which font do you use?

Stratoscope 14y ago
> I'm curious: if you were starting an open source project and you wanted to make contributing as seamless an experience as possible, would you still use tabs for indentation? That's an interesting question, because reducing friction for contributors is important. But yes, I'd still use tabs. It honestly sounds like the least of my worries. Clearly, many people prefer two-space indents as your study shows. But how many people are seriously inconvenienced if they have to edit a file using tabs? Don't modern programmer's editors detect a file's indentation settings automatically? Or do they? I'd hate to use an editor that didn't. I use Komodo IDE and even though I have tabs as my default, when I load a file using space indentation it uses the correct setting for that file. > As for coding in a proportional font, I've never even heard of that before. I'm tempted to try it just for a day, to see if I can get over the initial revulsion. Which font do you use? Well, if you think you'll find it revolting, then maybe you will. :-) It depends a lot on your coding style. If you use column alignment (alignment after the indent, as opposed to simple indentation) much, a proportional font won't work for you. I stopped using alignment in my code a long time ago, so when I tried a proportional font I hardly noticed any difference. I've tried a number of fonts, but the one I keep coming back to for some odd reason is Georgia - I just like the way it looks on my ThinPad display. Georgia is kind of a radically proportional font - numbers are proportionally spaced along with letters, where many other proportional fonts have monospaced numbers - but I just find it pleasing to my eye. Komodo has a killer feature for proportional font programming: when you set up a font/color theme, you specify two fonts, a proportional font and a monospaced font, and you can switch between those two fonts easily. Oddly enough, they don't provide a keyboard shortcut by default, but it's easy to set one up in their keyboard shortcut dialog - I use Alt+O on Windows. So when I'm reading code from someone who uses column alignment, I can just hit Alt+O and read it in a monospaced font.

by atroche 14y ago

Stratoscope 14y ago

> I'm curious: if you were starting an open source project and you wanted to make contributing as seamless an experience as possible, would you still use tabs for indentation? That's an interesting question, because reducing friction for contributors is important. But yes, I'd still use tabs. It honestly sounds like the least of my worries. Clearly, many people prefer two-space indents as your study shows. But how many people are seriously inconvenienced if they have to edit a file using tabs? Don't modern programmer's editors detect a file's indentation settings automatically? Or do they? I'd hate to use an editor that didn't. I use Komodo IDE and even though I have tabs as my default, when I load a file using space indentation it uses the correct setting for that file. > As for coding in a proportional font, I've never even heard of that before. I'm tempted to try it just for a day, to see if I can get over the initial revulsion. Which font do you use? Well, if you think you'll find it revolting, then maybe you will. :-) It depends a lot on your coding style. If you use column alignment (alignment after the indent, as opposed to simple indentation) much, a proportional font won't work for you. I stopped using alignment in my code a long time ago, so when I tried a proportional font I hardly noticed any difference. I've tried a number of fonts, but the one I keep coming back to for some odd reason is Georgia - I just like the way it looks on my ThinPad display. Georgia is kind of a radically proportional font - numbers are proportionally spaced along with letters, where many other proportional fonts have monospaced numbers - but I just find it pleasing to my eye. Komodo has a killer feature for proportional font programming: when you set up a font/color theme, you specify two fonts, a proportional font and a monospaced font, and you can switch between those two fonts easily. Oddly enough, they don't provide a keyboard shortcut by default, but it's easy to set one up in their keyboard shortcut dialog - I use Alt+O on Windows. So when I'm reading code from someone who uses column alignment, I can just hit Alt+O and read it in a monospaced font.