Top all-time · #1242
Nick Gravgaard
Personal blog · nickgravgaard.comprogrammingdesign
Nick Gravgaard's personal blog at nickgravgaard.com covers programming and design. Since 2008, 59 different Hacker News readers have linked it 81 times, most often “Elastic TabStops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code (2017)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Most-linked posts?
- Elastic TabStops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code (2017)23 people · 32 mentions · first linked 2015-05-12
- Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code18 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2008-10-15
- Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code16 people · 22 mentions · first linked 2020-12-24
What Hacker News says?
I saw this proposal lately that would allow proportional fonts everywhere: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastictabstops/
Comment linking /elastictabstops/
on “Light Table - a new IDE concept”Submitted Elastic TabStops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code (2017) as a story · 210 points
HN discussionOr you could use regular tab stop characters to align parts of adjacent lines. That's the idea behind elastic tabstops: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ Not all editors, however, support this style of alignment, even if they support plugins ( looks at vim and its forks ).
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust”Submitted Elastic Tab Stops: A Better Way to Indent and Align Code as a story · 82 points
HN discussionReally nice execution of a simple but compelling idea. And the presentation on the site is solid too - I get what this is immediately, and I could see how it would be useful to me. A replacement for that Sublime text window I keep around where I paste stuff to keep for later, or to examine some JSON I just grabbed from somewhere! I do find myself wanting more features, but of course the beauty of this is how simple…
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Show HN: Heynote – A dedicated scratchpad for developers”Submitted Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code as a story · 27 points
HN discussionI see it’s time to once again present the once-and-for-all solution to this tabs/spaces mess: Elastic Tabstops! http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Developers who use spaces make more money than those who use tabs”Submitted Programming fonts: proportional vs monospaced as a story · 4 points
HN discussion> You are requiring everyone who reads your code to use [elastic tabstops] if they want to see it formatted properly. It is not quite as bad as you make it sound. While editors which haven't yet implemented the elastic tabstops mechanism may not align some text properly in files where tabs were used with elastic tabstops, the problem isn't that bad. All leading tabs (indentation) will be okay, and the chances of tex…
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Programming Fonts – Test Drive”Submitted Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI would suggest that using elastic tabstops¹ is the only reasonable system for doing that. Sadly, the industry seems to be stuck in a local maxima where the simultaneous jump to both using proportional fonts (which would be better) and using elastic tabstops for alignment (which would be easier), constitutes too large of a distance to bridge in a single leap, and either one by itself isn’t worth the effort. Of cours…
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Programming Fonts – Test Drive”Submitted Elastic Tab Stops (2017) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> Still perpetually disappointed every new "neo terminal" is monospace tho. Have you thought of ways around the path dependence[1] on monospace imposed by existing bodies of textmode UIs (and source code)? It seems unlikely that a new terminal-esque tool would succeed without some kind of legacy support. The best concept I've come up so far with is to build in affordances which handle legacy vs. new-world user inter…
Comment linking /elastictabstops/
on “MathBox 2”Submitted Elastic tabstops: A better way to indent and align code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttps://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Comic Mono”Submitted Elastic Tabstops as a story · 2 points
HN discussionhttp://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002”Submitted Elastic tabstops – a better way to align and indent code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionElastic tabstops are clearly the best, but until we have good editor support I'm sticking with spaces. http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “How to Deploy Software”Submitted Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI've been using a proportional font since the beginning of the year. It took one week to adjust (things look weird for a few days). I tried the Input font time ago and didn't like the way it looked, but maybe I have to fiddle with its settings and find a way to make it look nicer. I'm using DejaVu Sans inside emacs now. The only shortcomings with the font are that l (lowercase el) and I (uppercase I) to be indisting…
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Hack: A typeface designed for source code”Submitted Elastic tabstops – a better way to indent and align code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI don't follow you -- `easier scanning of indentation levels'? With proportional font, the left-hand whitespace used for indentation of your code looks exactly as with monospaced font. Only the text itself changes somewhat. The width of tab/positions of tabstops has nothing to do with font itself; it's property (often settable) of the editor (or in rare case of the underlying terminal). May be expressed as `times th…
Comment linking /elastictabstops/
on “Top Programming Fonts”Submitted Elastic tabstops as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think you mean elastic tab stops https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Almost monospaced: the perfect fonts for writing”Submitted Elastic tabstops: a better way to indent and align code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionon the other hand, i appreciate being able to comment out lines by typing `//` and not having my indentation f'd up. i also like to be able to un-indent stuff using backspace rather than shift-tab. also, using tabs at 4-spaces allows me to more easily detect misalignment since deleting one 4-space tab is obvious, while deleting a single space is not. while i know EOL line comments are not everyone's cup of tea, good…
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “EditorConfig: Consistent coding styles across various editors and IDEs”Submitted Elastic tabstops - a better way to indent and align code as a story · 2 points
HN discussionAlas, if only tabs realized columns could occur in locations other than 8 or 4 space tab stops. http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/
Comment linking /elastic-tabstops/
on “Monospaced Programming Fonts with Ligatures”Submitted Programming fonts - proportional vs monospaced as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
