If you've ever used the Python language, you'll know that it is very particular about whitespace and indentation! Each nested block of code needs to be indented 4 spaces in from the last block of code, which is equivalent to a tab - or is it?

Python documentation, more specifically the PEP8 style guide, states that spaces should be used, and if you end up accidentally switching between spaces and tabs in your code Python 3 will throw a TabError. So why is this?

After doing some digging I found a Reddit thread that explains that a tab is actually a single character, despite it taking up the length of four spaces - check out the gif below to see what I mean - the first line is a tab, which when we use the arrow to move back is one character. The second line is 4 spaces, which are 4 separate characters that we can move back through individually.

This can cause issues when different IDE's interpret the characters differently to your IDE, or working within a team where some people tab and some people space - Madness and lots of errors!

Thankfully there is a workaround 🥳 Most IDE's allow you to customise your tab size, allowing you to specify the number of spaces a tab is equal to.

To adjust this in VSCode, open the settings and search for:

Editor: Tab Size

You can then adjust this to use 4 spaces each time you tab within a file. You can also adjust this in the settings.json file and configure the tab size for different languages - read more about this in my article Configure spacing in VSCode by Language

Let me know what camp you fall into in the comments below, and have a giggle at the clip below from Silicon Valley about tabs versus spaces 🤣