I saw the light when my team presented me with a “Larry Stewart, Code Meddler” plaque. I stopped editing other coders’ style on the spot. I might have missed the discussion, but when did indent(1) come along? The interwebs say it was in 4.1BSD. I went through a period thinking that indent with the project standard rules on checkin was a reasonable idea, but git at least doesn’t seem very friendly towards that sort of thing. Left to myself I use no tabs (except in Makefiles) and 2-space per level. I think the most important thing is to maximize the code visible per screenful. Lower indents permit longer identifiers before the dreaded line-wrapping. > On 2021, Mar 5, at 12:19 PM, Richard Salz wrote: > > > In my own case, I had been taught the golden rule of "use the style that is already in use" - which I admit, was a hard lesson when I was young I admit. > > In my first Unix job (roughly 40 years ago), I read the vi reference manual and memorized the keystroke commands. And then did > % cd /user/include > % vi *.h > to fix up all the indents and comments. > > Later on I graduated to learning not to do control-p on a Vax console a second time. > > What were your mistakes? ("Always mount a scratch monkey") > > > In