Indentation in Go: tabs or spaces?

Question

Is there a standard Google Go coding conventions document somewhere that sets whether tabs or spaces are preferred for indentation in Go source code?

What is the official recommendation, if any?

Tabulator

medium.com/@hoffa/… – Fisc

Answer 1

The official recommendation is formatting your code with

go fmt

or using the gofmt command directly

gofmt -w .

You can read more about it here on the go.dev blog, or from the Effective go document:

Indentation
We use tabs for indentation and gofmt emits them by default. Use spaces only if you must.

Tamaratamarack

Yes, tabs for indentation is the official recommendation. You can use space indentation as @Intermernet points out, but it is not the recommendation. – Tamaratamarack

@ErikAllik, actually, the official position is not "use tabs" but rather "use go fmt on your code before submitting it" (note there's also gofmt). What I'm trying to strees is that Go done this right not by just declaring a policy but by adopting a tool which enforces it. This is uncommon, so try to bend your head around this idea and adopt go fmt. Note that there are even automated solutions (for instance, official Go plugin for Vim supports the :Fmt command, IIRC). – Aney

@ErikAllik, if only you were right about "no coding-convention arguments"... ;-) – Aney

Just an observation: go fmt will keep space indentations inside declared strings (both "" and ``) but will indent code elsewhere with tabs. – Reisfield

Even though it's enforced by the tool, it is still important to know so one can configure how to represent tabs in their editor of choice. (For instance, Emacs users could set tab-width in their go-mode-hook.) – Foretooth

I think it's worth noting that adopting/requiring a tool does not stop all arguments, but it does mean that instead of people getting mad at you for your opinionated choices, people get mad at you for accepting the tool (and at the tool makers for their opinionated choices). – Nu

The fact that go fmt uses tabs instead of spaces for indentation causes issues when I run git add --patch and split chunks. Git changes tabs into spaces and then I get a: warning: 1 line adds whitespace errors. Does anyone else have this issue with git add --patch? – Der

Answer 2

EDIT 2: he original answer at the bottom is now incorrect. The correct section of the linked source file (current 30/12/2019) is:

Gofmt formats Go programs. It uses tabs for indentation and blanks for alignment. Alignment assumes that an editor is using a fixed-width font.

Thanks to TehSphinX for pointing this out!

ALL INFO BELOW THIS LINE IS NOW INCORRECT

EDIT: The original answer at the bottom is now incorrect. The correct section of the linked source file (current 25/07/2014) is:

Gofmt formats Go programs.
It uses tabs (width = 8) for indentation and blanks for alignment.

Original answer (deprecated):

Formatting control flags:
    -comments=true
        Print comments; if false, all comments are elided from the output.
    -tabs=true
        Indent with tabs; if false, spaces are used instead.
    -tabwidth=8
        Tab width in spaces.

Meneau

-tabs and -tabwidth are gone (and -comments is no longer documented at least; haven't looked more closely) – Gotha

@billisphere Thanks, I've updated the answer with the relevant section of the linked file. – Meneau

When you use tab characters there is no such thing as using a particular tab width, so the (former) tabwidth option has no effect and the "width=8” part of the updated text should be removed. Tab width is configured in the viewer. This error also exists in the linked source. – Improvised

This is outdated. There is no more mention of a tabwidth in the documentation of the gofmt command. It has been removed here: github.com/golang/go/commit/… – Carabiniere