Mind the Gap: Why Whitespace Isn't Just Empty Space

October 07th, 2025 6 min read

Keeping Tabs on Spaces

Ever thought about whitespace while programming? Probably not. Atleast I didn’t until recently. Yet whitespace is a core part of writing text and consequently code. Let’s explore an example to see why it matters. What does the following code do?

function greet(name){if(name){console.log("Hello, "+name+"!");}else{console.log("Hello, stranger!");}}greet("Alice");

Can't be bothered to read this? Me neither so let's add some whitespace to make this more readable:

function greet(name) {
  if (name) {
		console.log("Hello, " + name + "!");
  } else {
    console.log("Hello, stranger!");
	}
}

greet("Alice");

Much better! And yes, both examples are completely valid JavaScript. But without whitespace even the simplest code block can turn into a cryptic nightmare.

So problem solved. All you need to do is add some whitespaces and tabs make it look good and you can happily share your code with everyone right? right?

function greet(name) {
  if (name) {
		console.log("Hello, " + name + "!");
  } else {
    console.log("Hello, stranger!");
	}
}

greet("Alice");

Your colleague opens the code… and something feels off. What looked perfectly neat on your editor now looks like a chaotic mess. The culprit? Mixed tabs and spaces for indentation. You, blissfully coding in VSCode with a tab-size of 2, matched your spaces just fine, but your gigachad colleague is rocking bare-metal Vim with a tab-size of 8.

Origins of the Void

Ok, so now we know why whitespace does matter at least for readability we need to maybe take a look at what whitespace actually is. According to our dear friend ChatGPT "Whitespace refers to any character or series of characters in text that represent horizontal or vertical space but do not produce a visible symbol. They are used primarily for formatting, separation, and readability". There are far too many whitespace characters which I will not dive deeper into. Instead I'll to focus on the whitespace characters that matter most to programmers: tabs, space and the new-line character.

Spaces first appeared in written language to separate words and became standard on 19th-century typewriters. Tabs appeared later in the century, invented to align text into neat columns. Typewriters used a “tab stop” system, letting the carriage slide to preset stops for quick formatting, eliminating the need to insert spaces manually. Newlines (line breaks) came with teletypes and early printers, signaling “end of line, please return”, embodied in carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) control characters. As computing evolved, these made their way into early character sets like ASCII (1963), where SPACE, TAB, CR, and LF became official control characters. This legacy lives on in programming: spaces separate tokens, tabs align code blocks, and newlines keep code neatly organized.

In many languages such as Java, C or JavaScript whitespace is purely used for better readability. But in some languages, such as Python, whitespace is part of the syntax itself. Python’s use of whitespace makes code more concise, letting programmers define scope without brackets {}, parentheses (), or special keywords like if ... end. Fun fact if you mix spaces and tabs as indentation in Python it will throw an error. The most extreme example of whitespace as syntax is an esoteric language called Whitespace, which uses nothing but spaces, tabs, and line breaks to write programs.

Closing the Gap

That said, you don’t need to become a whitespace fanatic. Thankfully, formatters do most of the heavy lifting: trimming trailing spaces and avoiding mixed indentation. You can even make your editor show them. In Neovim you can, for example, toggle rendering whitespace with :set list and :set list!. To avoid a whitespace mess, set up your tooling and development environment properly. Just remember to configure it for each language, since every language has its own whitespace quirks and conventions.

How Nothing Taught Me Something

What got me thinking about whitespace intentionally was an internship I did. As usual, I was handed a brand-new machine, but since the internship was brief, I skipped fully setting up my development environment the way I normally would. I dove straight in, coding in Vim without plugins or formatters. My first !six! merge requests were rejected, all due to mixed tabs and spaces or trailing whitespace. At first, I was frustrated. Why fuss over indentation or spaces? But after thinking about it for a while, I slowly realized why senior colleagues insisted on it. Whitespace characters are just like any other, except most IDEs don’t render them. That makes them easy to mix up, but to a computer, a space, a tab, and a letter are all distinct characters. Just as you carefully name variables and fix typos to avoid bugs, you should handle whitespace with intent. In my case, sloppy whitespace made my colleague’s life harder. Different tab-size settings messed up the code’s appearance, and trailing spaces cluttered git diffs, drawing attention away from the logic.

The main goal of whitespace is to make code easier to read. If you notice it too much, it probably means something is off. Don't ignore it, be intentional. Because:

"Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand."