The Tab reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Tab

This article is about the use of the term Tab in computing. For other uses, see Tab (disambiguation).

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A tab key is the part of a keyboard which creates tabs. The most known and common tab is a horizontal tab, which in ASCII has the decimal character code of 9. There is also a vertical tab which in ASCII has decimal character code 11. Tabs are almost always rendered as a form of whitespace larger than a single space, while some text editors mark tabs with special graphics to facilitate distinguising tabs and whitespaces. In word processor applications, the tab key typically moves the cursor to the next tab stop. In most other graphical applications, the tab key will shift the focus to the next control or widget.

A UNIX program, expand expands a tab to a number of spaces and unexpand does vice versa.

Also, in computer programming, the use of tabs for code formatting is an ongoing debate. See Jamie Zawinski's "Tabs versus Spaces: An Eternal Holy War" for further explaination.

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