That's not what we're talking about. As Edgar pointed out, one doesn't have to press a key three of four or eight times to get that number of spaces. Edgar uses codeblocks, and that does it for him. I use gVim. With my gVim settings, pressing tab makes 4 spaces. It has auto-indentation, and ... well lets just say that it works in exactly the way that tabs would usually work except that the spacing is done using the space character rather than the tab character.

One reason to "impose your tab size on other people" is that sometimes I line up chunks of code that don't match the tab spacing. For example I might do something like this:

create_level("level 1 - warm up",   easy_ai,      unlimited_resources);
create_level("level 2 - challenge", medium_ai,    basic_resources);
create_level("level 3 - death",     difficult_ai, no_resources);

... Maybe that's not a good example, because you could still have tabs at the start and use the spaces inside the functions -- but the point is that sometimes the readability of code is damaged by changing the tab size. To be honest though, I don't really care much if other people are unhappy with the tab size in my code. If it is a shared project then we should agree on that kind of stuff before hand, but in my own code it doesn't matter. So I do what I do for my own convenience.

Like I said, Matthew, I have chosen my setting for my own convenience. Do you think that I haven't tried using tabs before? I prefer spaces. I've had a shot at trying to explain why. About all I can say now is this: if you don't like it, too bad.

Meaning I would have to set up the tab key to produce tabs at the start of a line but spaces (for alignment) in the middle of a line. That's doable, I've seen configuration options that do that. Still - it wouldn't be clever enough to insert spaces when I'm aligning a continued line, so it's not good enough.

Anyway, another reason I generally prefer spaces to tabs, personally: FORTRAN doesn't allow tabs to indent.
Sorry, let me rephrase that: some FORTRAN compilers do not allow you to use tabs to appear at the beginning of a line. Others do, but that doesn't help.

That said, anyone getting overly upset about something like this needs a hobby.

You'd use the space bar to put spaces in the middle of the line...

I don't get it. If you wanted to align this code:

012345678901234567890123456789

struct foo {
         | press tab 6 times |
         v                v
   int x;                  // lala
   int meaning_of_life;    // lala
                       ^  ^ 
                      | press tab 2 times, then backspace 2 times
                      | or press tab 1 time and space 1 time
}

Do you ever press spacebar? Or do you use tab between words too?

That's different from claiming that hitting tab inserts three spaces, which is what the other tab users on this thread have been saying.

And no, I don't see any point to lining up on "tab stops." If I want to align my comments (or whatever), they'll be uniform relative to the length of the longest line in the area.

In my code they're on the next tabstop after the longest line needing a comment in the same logical block - which is typically one or two spaces after the end of the line anyway.

I've seen configuration settings that do that (or similar) for vim. Also configurations for making the tab key insert tabs at the start of a line, spaces in the middle of a line (if there are non-white space characters to the left) and cleverly act as a completion key (as in the shell) while you're typing a word.

The answer, obviously, is 42.

ps: tabs, size 4.

Of course not. A soft tab width of 1 (i.e. 1 space) won't break python either, as long as you are consistent. You can even mix tabs and spaces, as long as you are consistent: if the first line of a block is indented with a string of whitespace characters (tabs, spaces, or both), all lines in that block must be indented similarly.

The max line length on my current project is 134 characters. Developing on a wide screen is nice.

I normally use tabs, with tabs set to display at 3 spaces. I find 4 is too large, and 8 is insane. But for some projects, like allegro, I try to set tab to insert spaces instead of tabs.

I follow as a guideline to keep my code under 80 characters, but break that often because some code is really just too long to break neatly. I'd rather have a very long, but easily understandable, line of code than something broken at funny places just to get things within parentheses within those constraints.

But I have a lot of wide monitors also, and find that on some projects where I like to use descriptive variable (and function) names, as long as it doesn't make me scroll horizontally, it's not too long.

My current, WIP, .vimrc (littered with commented lines; " is a comment character, IIRC):

:set number
:set ruler
:set tabstop=4

"set term=ansi
"set term=color_xterm
syntax on

":hi Normal
:hi comment cterm=none ctermfg=darkgreen

:hi constant cterm=none ctermfg=black
:hi identifier cterm=none ctermfg=black
:hi operator cterm=bold ctermfg=black
:hi string cterm=none ctermfg=black

:hi matchparen cterm=none ctermfg=white

:hi boolean cterm=none ctermfg=darkblue
:hi statement cterm=none ctermfg=darkblue
:hi type cterm=none ctermfg=darkblue

:hi preproc cterm=none ctermfg=darkcyan

:hi character cterm=bold ctermfg=darkgray
:hi special cterm=none ctermfg=darkgray

":hi underlined
":hi error cterm=none ctermfg=red

I configured the syntax highlighting to be more like the Visual Studio defaults I started with (i.e., keywords are blue, close to 0x0000FF, comments are dark green, numbers and strings are black, etc.). I just prefer it that way... There's probably a more correct place to put the highlighting, but oh well...

I try to as well. I often work from a Linux terminal and also just find that as a rule 80 chars is a good cut off point.

That's a rather silly reason; most people using spaces will press the tab key too, but just have it configured to insert spaces rather than tabs.
That's actually maybe the main the reason I use spaces rather than tabs: it's faster to align code by pressing tab than by pressing the space bar repeatedly. On the other hand, "ni <esc>" might be even faster.