Our code base was diverging with tab people and space people and it needed to be addressed. It can be quite dramatic having the “tabs vs spaces” developer discussions. If the discussion is at a post conference bar trip, you can name call, insult, belittle the opposite position. When this comes up at work it is vitally important the goal is to have consistency
We had a team meeting about it and the vote came down to 4v4 with some abstainers. We decided the vote with the only way reasonable people can to resolve things. We all bowed our heads and prayed to the Almighty God--
Of course not. I said reasonable people. We decided via paper-rock-scissors. It was a tie the first round. Both sides regrouped and finished dramatically with 2 wrapping defeats of spaces versus tabs.
Having proved the superiority of the tab argument, it came time to decide who would go in and standardize the code base. I fell on that grenade because I was the one that pulled the pin.
Tabify was mentioned. I did some bing searches, installed Visual Studio Power Tools, found the tabify, found out it doesn’t do the whole project. Wasted effort. Then realized it messed with all my studio settings for keyboard code navigation and ( ) { } autocompletion spacing. Took another 30 minutes to uninstall, settings partially restored, had to go find an old settings backup file. Jesus
Pulled out my trusty console application and wrote a console utility to do it. I’ve attached the code and it is pretty simple to follow along.
Good luck with your future tabs vs spaces troubles and I hope this helps anyone who is facing this same issue. This will also convert from tabs back to spaces.