I wonder how Linus feels about tabs vs. spaces (I didn't read the entire post, so maybe he addressed it?)
That is what he says
I.e. if your editor is configured with four-space tabs and a line with one leading tab shows up in your editor having 79 characters, it will show up as 83 characters for others assuming the normal 8-space tabs thus breaking the line length rule.
Not to mention that coding style may require that function calls broken to 2 lines must have the arguments aligned at the opening parenthesis.
For example, breaking up foobarbaz(1, 2); into two lines would require having the second line start with <TAB><SPACE><SPACE>2); which would no longer look correct with 4-space tabs.
That doesn't result in any problems with using <TAB>s, unless the coding style also requires you to replace all (leading) sequences of N spaces with with a <TAB>, which is, IMO, quite brain-dead. For example,
if (cond) {
<TAB>foo(1,
<TAB><SP><SP><SP><SP>2);
}
Admittedly, your first problem remains; a problem with dumb editors. In truth, your editor could well signal if your lines exceed the limit (indent-width*indent + rest) you have set for your project, just as easily as it can draw a line at a column.
The harder problem is that you need a context-aware editor for it to help you with indenting. Most editors are incapable of that by default.
It is brain-dead, but that is exactly what is required in many styles.