The tabs vs. spaces debate makes me very sad. I get it, big companies use spaces because interns are stupid and don't understand how tabs work. And some people monomaniacally want their code to look exactly the same everywhere.

But I wish it could just be acknowledged somewhere that, if you know what you're doing, tabs are better and have no downsides (except that you can't control how other people see your code).

Caveat: I really mean tabs + spaces for complicated formatting beyond the indent level of the current line.

Regarding 80 character width, I'm often coding on my laptop and I really appreciate it when code is kept within those bounds as it allows me to vertically tile 3 files without line-breaks. Also, I find that it forces me to write more succinctly. 'One idea per line' is a good idea and 80 characters is a good arbitrary limitation that helps me achieve that.