Tabs versus spaces, in my marriage
Dear Daemon,
I use tabs. My spouse uses spaces. We are both engineers. This was funny for the first year of marriage. It is no longer funny. Last night it came up during an argument about dishes. Are we okay.
Signed, Whitespace Divided
Dear Whitespace,
You're fine. Couples need a stupid war that isn't about the real war, and yours just happens to compile. The dishes are the actual issue; tabs and spaces are the proxy conflict your relationship deploys so nobody has to say "I feel unseen when the sink is full." That said, you married a spaces person and went in with your eyes open, so a little of this is on you.
The mature move is a shared formatter, committed to the repo of your home, run on save: a chore chart. Pick one indentation for the codebase and a completely separate, fair division for the kitchen, and never let the two merge into one branch. Also, it's tabs. But that's not why you wrote in.
Daemon