Only works if people use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment which I've never seen anybody maintain successfully on a big project. The code the parent linked is not indentation, it's alignment so it should be formatted using spaces regardless otherwise it breaks that way. If you have to impose tab width to have proper readability then what's the point? Try hacking the linux kernel with tabs != 8 spaces and see how long you last before all the broken alignment drives you crazy.

Furthermore if your coding style imposes some kind of width restriction you also have to commit to a certain tab width anyway.

Beyond that if you really value configurability it's a bit odd to limit yourself to "I want to configure tab width". How about bracket positions, spacing between operators, variable names etc... ? All these seems are arguably more important for readability and code understanding than indentation. Ideally programming languages would be stored as abstract syntax trees that you can display however you like but we're still using dumb all ASCII text files.

In theory tabs are mildly superior to spaces, pragmatically it's spaces all day every day as far as I'm concerned.

That's the problem, though. People do that, and then to indent 12 spaces, your guy who uses 4-space tabs will put three tabs, your girl who uses 8-space tabs will put a tab and four spaces, and your ace who uses only spaces will put twelve spaces. And after a year of sharing code doing this, your formatting will be farked and you'll spend half your time fixing other peoples' "broken" indentation.

I have no issue whatsoever with using tabs in an editor, as long as it saves them as spaces on disk.

Tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment.

You wouldn't need to customize anything, it would look good at all tab widths and people who prefer 2 space sized indents would be able to use that in their editors.

Actually, it could be even better, we could use tabs for aligning to tables too if editors supported elastic tabstops [0]. Unfortunately, the only ones that do don't support other essential features like saving when they lose focus.

Please note that i disagree with how the example aligns function params. The space/tab there looks bad and params should be aligned with spaces using a formatting tool (which every sane language should have).

Or, y'know, scratch that, why don't we commit the AST (enhanced to include comments and other hints like blank lines) to git and let everyone use their formatting.

</rant>

[0]: http://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/

I'm pretty sure its perfectly aligned if you have the correct tab size that was used for the whole project. Which is the stupidest thing about using tabs over spaces.

Ah yes tab, the only ascii character where the rendering is user configurable.