Indenting and Spacing

Indenting and Spacing

There is a semantic way of using tab characters and spaces in C++ source code: use tabs for indentation and use spaces for alignment. This ensures that the code is displayed correctly everywhere, regardless of the viewer's tab size.

    // Tab size: 4                // Tab size: 2
    if (foo)                      if (foo)
    {                             {
    --->int arr[4] = {0, 1,       ->int arr[4] = {0, 1,     // "0" and "2"
    --->..............2, 3};      ->..............2, 3};    // remain aligned
    }                             }

Thus:
1. Tabs are only used at the beginning of lines. Everything else, like ASCII art and tables, should be formatted with spaces.
2. Tabs are only used for expressing the indentation level. One tab per "block"---any remaining whitespace is spaces only.

Tabs and spaces are often misunderstood. (Original comic by Steve Napierski.)

This page is an edited excerpt of the page http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs.

This work is licensed to you under version 2 of the GNU General Public License. Alternatively, you may choose to receive this work under any other license that grants the right to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute the work, as long as that license imposes the restriction that derivative works have to grant the same rights and impose the same restriction. For example, you may choose to receive this work under the GNU Free Documentation License, the CreativeCommons ShareAlike License, the XEmacs manual license, or similar licenses.