-*- indented-text -*- 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 123456789 1234567890 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 | All text editors are not alike, and even when they are they may not be configured similarly in all environments; and all text viewing tools, including "cat" or its moral equivalent, are also very important to consider. My point was more about the fact that the 8-char spacing for a physical tab stops was effectively set in stone almost before Unix. It's far to late to even discuss different spacing for tab characters in plain text documents. I've been using computers for a fairly long time now it seems (long enough to have used real, mechanical, tab stops on manual typewriters at the same time), and though I've encountered terminals and terminal emulators that either have no tab character support, or which have fully programmable tab stops. All of the ones that have default or fixed tab stops do so at 8 character spaces (there was one odd old terminal I remember that I think missed having the first stop in the first column, though none in recent memory, and none new enough to necessitate such a quirk flag in the termcap database). However I've never ever seen anyone anywhere use anything other than 8 character spaces for a regular tab stop on any kind of computer terminal interface and get away with it, i.e. if they ever have to share files with anyone other than themselves and their own imaginations. The only terminal definition in esr's terminfo(5) database with a tab spacing other than 8 is the QNX console terminal emulator (which is claimed to use 4). According to an early version of the original terminfo(5) database there was also once upon a time a line of terminals by AT&T that defaulted to having tab stops set every 5 spaces, but only in their 40-column mode (att2300 and att2350). I don't really care how anyone else indents their code (though I do prefer one tab per indent level both for visual ergonomics as well as for the logical consistency), but if anyone does use tab characters anywhere then their tabs had damn well better be used in place of 8 character spaces, not one more, and not one less, and definitely not 4, not 2, and never 5, 3, or 6; and 7's just stupid (though 1 would be better than 9 or more). I do wish I knew the definitive history of the choice of 8. It seems to me it was probably DEC who started it with the default setting for tab stops on the VT52 or there abouts, but I can't really find any explanation other than the "obvious" fact that it gives a nice even 10 stops per line. A note for those of you who avoid 8-space tabs because of 80-columns. Nobody really uses an 80-column terminal any more (except for some die-hard stuck-in-the-dried-mud VGA-console-only adherents). We can (almost) all use terminal emulator windows with as much as twice as many columns. Get over yourselves! That kind of nostalgia is counter- productive and pointless. Think about where 80 columns comes from in the first place -- it was punched cards, right? Now how do you think a tab character is stored on a punched card??? I don't know of any serious programmer from the early days who actually read their code on punched cards, even if that's how it was input -- they read it on printouts, printouts that were 132 columns wide, with tabs expanded to nice easy-to-see jumps of eight spaces (or more). Anyway, use tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment, and expand your tabs to whatever width you prefer. Just don't impose stupid line length limits on indented code!