Space or Tab in Vim

Reason for this post

I, personally, have been struggled with this issue for some time. I am kinda person who has a really poor memory, but i am pretty sure i’ve googled it for at least twice, and each time, has spent decent amount of time on researching.

I really missed the old days When i was a (Notepad++?Sublime Text2?or Atom?️) user who has a spirit of sticking to the original (default settings). But once you fell into some other “Linux/Unix born” 👻 editors, like Vi/Vim or Emacs, you normally will only have 2 choice, endless of suffering or save yourself.

Advantage vs Disadvantage

Space beats Tab

1. Space is widely used for aligning text, text alignment and formatting is useful especially for annotation and documentation.
2. Space share the same look across all different platforms while tab might look very different
3. Some languages enforces/strictly recommends stylish rules, like python(4 spaces indention), javascript(2 spaces indention), java(mostly 4 spaces indention) etc.

Tab beats Space

1. Tab is highly customizable they can be changed to arbitrary values(3,4,8 etc) as the reader wants/used to.
2. It’s obvious that tab helps save a lot of spaces when it comes to editing large files with multiple lines.

Vim tab settings

• expandtab: applies to write mode only. Set/convert vim’s tab to space in insertion mode. If set, it implies that that only space will be used for insertion all the time.
• ts: aka. tabstop, applies to read mode only. It denotes (# of columns) the tab character visually displays/appears in vim, by default it’s 8 in most Unix/Linux Systems and NOT recommended to be changed for some printing and cross platform reasons.

• sts: aka. softtabstop, applies to write mode. It represents , in insertion mode, that pressing a tab key (# of columns) will be inserted.

  • if sts > ts: vim uses as many tab as possible and fill the rest with space to represents a tab press in insertion mode, for eg.setlocal sts = 20 ts = 8, then vim uses 2 tab + 4 space to represent a tab press.
  • elif sts < ts: vim fills (sts)# of space when pressing a tab in insertion mode.
• sw: aka. shiftwidth, denotes # of columns >> or << equals to.
• stab: aka. smarttab, it tells vim to use sw for indention at the beginning of each line, whereas ‘tabstop’ and ‘softtabstop’ are used elsewhere.

Some reference settings

From Vim wiki:

Create file html.vim(~/.vim/after/ftplugin/html.vim) with contents:

setlocal shiftwidth=2
setlocal tabstop=2

and file python.vim with contents:

setlocal expandtab
setlocal shiftwidth=4
setlocal softtabstop=4

or if .vimrc is preferred,

autocmd FileType html setlocal shiftwidth=2 tabstop=2
autocmd FileType python setlocal expandtab shiftwidth=4 softtabstop=4

My personal funky .vimrc settings

autocmd FileType * setlocal noexpandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4 smarttab
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.py setlocal expandtab tabstop=4 shiftwidth=4
autocmd BufNewFile,BufRead *.js setlocal expandtab shiftwidth=2 softtabstop=2

Conclusion

In fact, the debate among space or tab is just like single quote or double quote, semicolon or nosemicolon. It’s mainly a stylish problem which heavily relies on personal taste. Kinda like vim or emacs, years of debate will not help bring them to an end. From my personal shallow intuitive perspective, i will just follow something i am in favor of. As i’ve been using space over tab for some time(notice, i’m a js citizen, to be more precise, a js newbie👶), i find it could be fun to switch to the tribe of tab for a while.