Maintaining Maximum Line Length When Using Tabs Instead of Spaces?

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 1:15 PM, Aahan Krish <krish at aahan.me> wrote:
> My question is to them (because I want to use tabs too) is: how do you
> maintain a line-length of 79 characters?
>
> E.g. scenario: The tab setting in your editor could be 2 or 4, and in
> other developer's browser it could be 8. The code will be longer than
> 79 chars in the latter's editor.

Easy: You stop fretting about 79 characters. :)

If your policy is "lines are no more than 80-100 characters long",
then the difference between 4-space tabs and 8-space won't break stuff
unless it was already marginal. So if you run 4-space (or 2-space)
indentation, you just make sure you keep your lines to the lower end
of the limit.

Even better, don't quibble about any sort of specific limit, and just
have a policy of "don't make stuff so long that it's unreadable, and
don't put silly arbitrary rules on your programmers". That's my
policy.

ChrisA