One of the nice thing about indenting with actual tab characters is that you separate the notion of 'indentation' from the actual indentation. I set my tab stops to 4 which tightens the code, others set it to 8, still others set it to 2. If the code has tab characters it just works, if the code has spaces there is no way to have your most comfortable indentation level be used.
Yes, yes, yes. I'm saddened that tabs have essentially 'lost' - they seem to me in every way superior to spaces, but I would never use them in a new project simply because it would be likely to throw off others, and perhaps tooling. Github, for example, does not play nicely.
Github works better if you do that, agreed. But IIRC (I don't do this any more, so this is from memory) it uses eight space tabs as a default, and can only be changed on the 'raw' pages.
> Try using tabs to indent e.g. arguments to function one under another, and weep.
Where the terms are distinguished in a programming context, that's alignment, not indentation; tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment is a common suggestion.
Sure, as long as you don't mix them on one line (i.e. first indent, then align), because then differences between tab widths will still break alignment.
I just realised my invalid belief was caused by experiencing dumb editors in the past, which wouldn't recognise aligning and would turn your example into:
\t\tsome_func(arg1,
\t\t\t arg2,
\t\t\t argN)
I.e. they would replace all sequences of tab-width spaces with a tab character.
First indent and then align will retain alignment with different tab widths, because you only align things that are at the same indent level, so different tab widths in a tab indent / space align combination just move the whole aligned block left or right without affecting alignment.
