Re: [gentoo-dev] About how many spaces a tab represents

[Aaron W. Swenson]

On Mon, Apr 15, 2013 at 08:15:08AM +0200, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El lun, 15-04-2013 a las 07:21 +0200, Michał Górny escribió:
> > On Sun, 14 Apr 2013 23:22:04 +0200
> > Pacho Ramos <pacho@g.o> wrote:
> >
> > > I noticed this problem now that joe was modified to comply with this
> > > rule set in devmanual:
> > > http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/file-format/index.html#indenting-and-whitespace
> > >
> > > It stated a tab represents 4 spaces. Where does this rule come from? Why
> > > 8 spaces wasn't chosen instead? I say that because looks like 8 spaces
> > > equivalence is used by tools like "cat", "less", even CVS reports in
> > > gentoo-commits show tabs as 8 spaces instead of 4.
> >
> > Hmm, does that have implications on anything else but counting line
> > width?
> >
>
> Well, I was a bit surprised an ebuild I was thinking was looking in a
> way, was really shown a bit different when, for example, simply running
> less over it :/
>

A tab is a tab. How wide it is, is up to you. The convention is that
four spaces should be replace by a tab. You can configure tab width
for your terminal with:

    setterm -regtabs 4

If you want to, that is.

-- 
Mr. Aaron W. Swenson
Gentoo Linux Developer
Email : titanofold@g.o
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