Don't get lured by the Dark Side! Accessibility is the real reason you must use tabs instead of spaces for indentation [1]. Yes, it's evident that Accessibility is not valued and that it's easier/cheaper to not care. We should start to care. Maybe it doesn't even cost that much. Just by flagging it on formatting commit hooks or in some plugin in static analysis tools like Sonar, would go a long way in raising awareness and improving this.
Developers with visual impairment have different needs regarding indentation. One could need a tab-width of 1 due to the use of gigantic font size and the other a tab-with of 8 because of a wide monitor.
Meh. I find "accessibility is the trump card" arguments as blase as "security is the trump card" arguments - such arguments reflect badly on their speakers - all is tradeoffs.
In the linked case, I'd argue that specialized fonts or editors are a better choice. After all, even if you make all the code in your repository "accessible" by using tabs, your accessibility-limited colleagues might have to interact with code outside your repository (e.g. Stack overflow, or dependencies) that uses spaces. Something in the presentation layer (e.g. fonts or a screen reader) is far more likely to work consistently and correctly. Solve problems at the right layer.
That stated, I can see why such an objection might win the day. Nobody wants to take on the accessibi problem when solving a small problem like spacing consistency.
Developers with visual impairment have different needs regarding indentation. One could need a tab-width of 1 due to the use of gigantic font size and the other a tab-with of 8 because of a wide monitor.
[1] Nobody talks about the real reason to use Tabs over Spaces https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341354)
Previous threads https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20381027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20341354