There might be similar posts regarding this in the past. So, please forgive me.
I often find it hard to edit a post which has lengthy code (indented using 4 spaces). Also, there are higher chances of editing wrong while dealing with lengthy code which is indented using 4 spaces.
So I generally feel indentation is only good for one-line code and backticks are good for multi-line code.
What's the community's opinion about this?
My personal preference is to use the triple backtick as that's the most common way to set code blocks in Markdown outside of Stack Exchange. I find it much easier to use.
When I am editing someone else's post though, if it's a small piece of code, I just select it and click on the {} button in the editor. The default behaviour of that button is to use 4 spaces.
If it's a large block of text that needs to be formatted as code, I find it much easier to just add triple backticks at the start and triple backticks at the end.
On a side note, fenced markdown for code blocks wasn't available on SE until it was released in 2019. Another thing to note is that in the case of a very large text, especially logs, using 4 spaces might not be possible as it can cause the post to reach its character limit. Although, I have never encountered this issue myself.
In summary, I don't think we need a consensus. Just go with whatever you prefer until SE decides to stop supporting one of the methods.
Ctrl+K shortcut can also be used instead of the {} button (it's also contextual).
Commented
Nov 24, 2020 at 13:00
Just like Dan, I don’t think we need a consensus. In your posts, use whatever you want (but keep the difference of in-line vs. block code formatting as Mark Kirby noted).
However, if I edit someone else’s post, I apply a bit stricter rules. I use ``` for multi-line code as only the line before and after the code block gets modified in the diff view while with 4 spaces, it would be every line of the block. In the case of a single line code block (mostly a command), I prefer 4 spaces because just one line gets modified – and I save at least 4 bytes1 of the disk space. ;-)
1 Just double ``` means 6 characters. And each newline means 1–2 characters depending on the platform.
I actually know of five ways to format code on SE, not including the editor button (click edit to see):
back ticks
html
four spaces
blocks using back ticks
blocks using tilde
I know, that is even more confusing, but if we look at the way they format code, I think we can see that back tick and html are for inline code like this and the other are for formatting whole blocks of code.
To back up my claim, if we use the button in the editor, it makes back ticks for this and four spaces for
this
so would strongly imply this is what the different ways to format code were intended for, even if I can't find a direct quote to back it up right now.
I don't think it makes any difference at all. I am very used to the 4-spaces indentation, my muscle memory works that way and there is a nifty userscript that means I can indent by just selecting text and hitting tab, just like you do in many code editors. Selecting a block of text and hitting tab to indent it, is so common that I am sure many of us will be very tied to it from the various editors we use. I really, really don't want to lose this.
In any case, as far as I can tell, both three backticks and four spaces produce the exact same html rendering, so I really don't see any reason to have guidelines. We can all use whichever of the two (or ~~~) we prefer.
