I prefer 2 spaces. Soft indentation at all costs, doesn't matter if the number of spaces should be higher, but tabs are evil. Because tab character is represented by various number of spaces across the editors. So I set tab in IDE to insert 2 or 4 spaces instead.

And I know what I'm talking about, I opened .cs file generated in MSVC by two people in kwrite and what I got was a mess. Code wasn't aligned, because indentation was all messed up - sometimes spaces, sometimes tabs.

Tab characters are always ambiguous, some software show them as N hard spaces, some align on columns multiple of N.
I'm working on large existing code (1.5Mb of C) with a few other coders, and as long as nobody puts a tab character we're all fine.
When a tab does appear, it's easy to find and fix.
Googlecode doesn't handle tab characters, the code loses all indentation when viewed in the site.

Well, on Firefox 2 the tabs disappear entirely. I don't blame the software or site, I just try to do my best with what I have (which is windows 98).
Glad to know it works on whichever browser you're using.

Working by myself, whatever the default tab is.
Working with anyone else, whatever the group decides.

That's stupid. In many modern languages, there is a namespace, a class and then methods... That's 3 levels of indentation right there. No control structures for you!
Tabsize 8 is just HUGE, and does not (imo) make it any more readable.

I'm not so sure.

He seems pretty religious about it

While it's true that the display of tabs depends on the viewer, tabs should not be used on a line after any non-tab characters. So they should be used strictly for leading indents. When that rule is followed, the readability of code shouldn't be affected by the number of spaces that the tab character represents for the person viewing it.

I hate tabs, they are awful, especially when people combine them with spaces (for example, if tab is set at 8 and they are indenting with 4, and need to do 12, they press a tab and four spaces!).

So, I press the space bar four times and done.

We've already been over this... The optimal solution is to use tabs for indentation and spaces for alignment.

teh_codez
{
[tab]teh_codez
[tab]{
[tab][tab]teh_codez
[tab][tab]teh_codez moar_codez moar_codez
[tab][tab]                     moar_codez
         ^ identation         ^ alignment
[tab][tab]teh_codez
[tab]}
[tab]teh_codez
}

No matter what editor you view that code in, it should always appear cleanly indented. You can also indent with a single key press and remove indentation (even in simple editors) with a single key press.

3 spaces.

Softabs of 42 spaces in vim. Alignment comes out same in all editors. Vim's backspace doesn't break either.

That linux coding style is awful. And the doc is obviously written by an opinionated douchebag too.

I like to indent the outtards instead of the innards. Since indented things stand out more the important stuff (like function names) get the most attention.

        void output(ostream &out)
        {
      for(int i = 0; i < 24; i++)
    if(i%24)
  for(int j = 0; j < i; j++)
out << i * j << endl;
        }

It also just looks prettier.