Visual Studio 2010; Tab and indent size should be separate settings as in previous VS versions

Question

I just saw this post on Microsoft Connect(while browsing on /.) about combining tab and indent option into one in VS2010.

They say they did ask here. But I don't see 8 comments being enough.

I usually use the default setting but sometime(in fact rarely) I do use customs settings.

They provide code and say it's our job now to manage these settings.

Final response, for now, from Microsoft;

Thanks again to everyone who has voiced an opinion on this issue. I unfortunately have to reiterate what I posted earlier: we cannot revert the UI for this before RTM. It's too late in the product cycle and too close to the VS 2010 ship date. Had the team heard this feedback a few months ago, the discussion about what to do for VS 2010 RTM could potentially have been reopened; again, we did phase in this change gradually and poll a wide variety of internal and external users to make sure all points of view could be considered before making a final decision. We'll be revisiting this issue for future versions and possibly for a VS 2010 service pack if/when one is to be released, but for RTM we're simply out of time.

Why are they doing this? Anyone know?

Answer 1

Well, the answer appears to be in the thread for your first link:

It's unfortunately not as simple as finding someone who wants a feature to be a certain way. Merging these two options into one eliminated a class of bugs that originated from setting them differently; we didn't consider changing this simply because we felt one fewer text box would constitute a significant improvement. In the absence of a critical mass of users who voiced negative feedback, we made the decision to update the options.

And those 8 comments weren't the only feedback they got, apparently. Quoting yet again:

Regarding user feedback on the decision to merge these two options, we asked a wide variety of people and phased in the changes gradually. We blogged publicly about the potential change on the VS Editor blog (admittedly not the most widely-read VS blog, but readership was significant enough to generate discussion): http://blogs.msdn.com/vseditor/archive/2009/03/19/how-do-you-use-tab-size-and-indent-size.aspx. We solicited feedback from members of Microsoft's MVP program, who spend a lot of time in Visual Studio, and from many internal teams and developers who use Visual Studio. We also phased in the change gradually: for Beta 1, Indent Size was disabled/grayed out and always set to the same value as tab size. In the absence of negative customer feedback on this, we merged the Tab Size and Indent Size options into a single “Tab and indent size” option for Beta 2.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, just that Microsoft appears not to have just inflicted this on their users without at least some consultation. I'm no Microsoft fan-boy in case you think I'm an apologist, other than XP at work, I pretty much use al free software. It just seems to me they may not be totally in the wrong here. And I have had experiences with customers trying to get changes made to software late in the cycle - it's a royal PITA :-)

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More worrying to me would be the comment from your second link:

Visual Studio 2010 can support multiple font faces and multiple font heights

Colour and italicise my code all you want, but you'll have to prise my beloved fixed width font from my cold dead hands!

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And I've just noticed that MS went out of their way to actually give a workaround to those people who vehemently want the setting kept separate. The comment on the second link, dated Dec 16 2009, gives an editor extension that allows different values to be set for tabs and indents. This is pretty darn good service if you ask me.

Answer 2

EDIT: As you can now see on the Connect bug, we've split the settings back out and I went through and fixed up all the behavior issues with the split options (minus 3 or so bugs that were in the VS2008 implementation, mostly around un-indenting). It won't be patched into the RC, but it'll be there when VS2010 ships.

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(I'm a developer on the Visual Studio editor team)

To be accurate, we didn't precisely remove the feature; one of the tradeoffs we made while writing this piece of the new editor was that the cost of reimplementing it, relative to the numerous other things we had to write and what we thought the benefit was, was going to be fairly high. However, we weren't convinced that we had an accurate idea of what the benefit was, so Brittany did all of the things she listed to try and get a better idea of the impact, and again and again we were met with people who really didn't care (the vast majority of people seem to use 4/4). So we disabled it in Beta 1, and didn't get much negative feedback. We removed the option completely in Beta 2, and still didn't get very much negative feedback until the last 2 weeks, at which point it has become too late for us to put it back in (for RTM, at least).

Also, it isn't just a matter of re-enabling the option in the dialog (though that is basically what Brittany's extension does), as the editor itself still doesn't consider indentation/tab size to be different settings (internally, there is just TabSizeOptionId). Though the language services, which generally are the clients that care most about these settings, should handle them correctly, the editor doesn't distinguish between the two, and will end up using the tab size setting in cases where the indent size setting should probably be used.