> Nothing would be broken if what we have now remains the default, and only a special tag option changes the behavior.
It would only be used by three people :) And I'm not sure of even that. You've said in the past you don't use [code=syntax], despite it's line numbering, because you're too lazy to type in more than just [code].

>You've said in the past you don't use [code=syntax]
I do now. Before it was because it didn't do what I wanted, but now it seems to work okay.

That's weird. I never changed its behaviour from when it was first introduced.

What I wanted might have changed. My preferences have been known to change over time.

http://www.daniweb.com/forums/post471579-13.html

I just played around with vBulletin. There's no way to specify more than one parameter for bbcode (such as [code=php;tab=2]) without doing some *serious* hacking. Doable, but not convinced it's worth all the time and effort considering that it's a brute force style solution that is only going to work half the time and requires the code to already be well-formatted and have nothing commented out going in, and that only 5 people would be able to make use of it.

Then if we're to promote it as a new feature, I think it will just cause more confusion about how to use code tags. And the fact that no one has replied to this thread also says something about how many people care about it.

All in all, I agree that the default tabs are too big, but I don't think that converting them to spaces is the solution.

IMO going all the way to convert tabs into spaces using some intelligent algorithm is way too much trouble than it's worth. It is basically the responsibility of the programmer posting the code to make sure that all tabs are converted to spaces and to follow the 80 column width limit if he wants to make sure his/her code looks good.

A good solution, if possible, would be to have 2 space tabs instead of what we have now.

Two spaces is too small - it makes it harder to line up brackets for really long code blocks.

>Two spaces is too small
One of my coworkers says the same thing. We have constant debates (playful, of course) about the merits of his four space tab style versus my two space tab style. It's playful because we both understand that both are equally readable.

>it makes it harder to line up brackets for really long code blocks.
First, if you have a long enough code block that it's an issue, you might want to think about refactoring. Second, while I've heard a lot of people say that before getting used to it, the complaint goes away shortly after they adopt two space tabs.

> Two spaces is too small - it makes it harder to line up brackets for really long code blocks.

Believe me, it's not. And I am pretty sure this is coming from you considering that you are used to 4 spaces for a tab. :-)

I am pretty sure that 2 space tabs would definitely bring down the indented mess that we get to deal everyday especially when dealing with tab-o-maniacs.

depends on the OS and the settings. UNIX and DOS use different encoding for tabs.

> UNIX and DOS use different encoding for tabs.

A tab is a tab and nothing but a tab. There is no *different* encoding. It's just the way a tab is rendered (w.r.t. the number of spaces) which differs. Plus AFAIK, it has got nothing to do with the OS as such but rather the piece of software used when visually rendering a tab.

There used to be settings for tab stop spacing in the browsers. They seem to have been removed.

Really??

I can't imagine that we're the only people who want to be able to change the tab spacing in browsers, so I'm going to continue searching the web for a way to render tabs differently visually while preserving a tab's unique functionality.