You’ve met this person. Maybe you’ve been this person.
The conversation is going fine — new codebase, casual onboarding, someone mentions the formatter config — and then they speak. Eyes slightly too bright. Posture a little too ready.
“We use spaces here, by the way. Four of them.”
And you nod, because you don’t care, because a formatter exists specifically so you don’t have to care. But they keep going. There’s a reason they use spaces. There are several reasons, actually. Would you like to hear them?
No. But here they come anyway.
I don’t think the tabs/spaces debate is about indentation. I think it’s a proxy for something else: the need to have a correct opinion on a thing that can’t hurt you either way.
The stakes are low enough that you can be as loud as you want without consequences. It’s the perfect hobby opinion. You can dress it up in pragmatism (“consistency!”) or accessibility (“tab width renders differently!”) and feel like you’re making a reasoned argument. But really you just like having a position.
I do this too, by the way. Different hills. Same behavior.
The honest version is: it doesn’t matter, pick one, move on.
The formatter enforces it. The team adapts in a week. Nobody will remember in a month. The codebase doesn’t care about your personal feelings about the visual weight of indentation.
What does matter is the thing you were going to build before someone derailed it into a twenty-minute sidebar about developer ergonomics.
So yeah. Four spaces. Sure. Can we talk about the actual problem now?