The only reason *for* tabs is it makes for smaller source files. Now days hoever *zip makes short work of all repeating character sequences so the only reason for tabs has gone away.

From the WordPress Codex on coding style: Indent! Your indentation should always reflect logical structure. Use real tabs and not spaces, as this allows the most flexibility across clients.

Yes always indent to reflect logical structure but never use a tab character to do it. The problem is there is no longer a standard for the definition of a tab – it used to be “stop at the next modulo8 column” – but then people were given the chance to “adjust” this WITHOUT defining their abstraction within the given document… and now we have a complete mess. Spacs are now the only well defined whitespace (that doesn’t break a line).

The action of the tab key and the presence of a tab character have now become totally orthoganal concepts. What source editors do when you press tab should no longer ever include inserting a 0×9 into a document…

However, vim does make it easy to deal with either tabs or spaces:

First of all,
:set tabstop=N

Then, to convert new tabs to spaces as you type
:set expandtab (or :set noexpandtab if you like tabs)

And to fix a tab formatted file by converting all tabs to spaces
:retab (or :retab N, where N is the new tabstop value)

Next poll: EMACS or vi?

(I also like pie, but that’s another story).

However, as Sean and Dan point out, tabs all-too-often turn into a strange mix of tabs and 4/8-spaces.

So I’ll use tabs for code that I make, but I rarely just the tabs of others.

Actually, Zawinski’s article linked above contains notes on how to configure vi/vim to do this, but also makes the larger point that the safest bet is to go ahead and use tabs while coding but configure your editor to convert tabs to an equivalent number of spaces while saving to disk (in BBEdit this is the entab/detab command). Which makes a certain amount of sense.

Indent! Your indentation should always reflect logical structure. Use real tabs and not spaces, as this allows the most flexibility across clients.

I’m on the tab side. Probably because that’s what I learned and all I’ve ever done, but it does feel the most logical to me, since tabs are abstract — the width of a tab is up to the displaying editor. If I like narrow indentations and you like wide ones, we can both have our way at the same time by configuring our editors differently. And I like that tabs save bytes. And I like that I can indent entire blocks of code cleanly and quickly with tabs (maybe this is possible in vi with spaces as well as with tabs, though I don’t see how)

I do agree that it’s a mess when they’re mixed, but disagree with Sean that tab people tend to use both tabs AND spaces. It would never occur to me to indent code with a space, so I don’t do that. Though others might.

The WordPress codebase is all tab indented, and according to the mailing list traffic, the topic had never come up until now – everything’s been humming along merrily.

My space-centric comrade reports that after using tabs for a month on this project he’s grown to like them.