Tabs are a totally different thing with completely different properties than any particular number of spaces.
If you are thinking of tabs in terms of how many spaces they are, you are doing tabs wrong.
A tab is really a jump to a specific measurement that you set. That most word processors have tab stops automatically every half inch has only helped train people to not understand tabs.
And this is precisely why a tab is terrible for code. That convention makes sense for rich text but not at all for indenting code, which is the entire origin of the “spaces vs tabs” debate.
As long as a tab is just 4 spaces
Tabs are a totally different thing with completely different properties than any particular number of spaces.
If you are thinking of tabs in terms of how many spaces they are, you are doing tabs wrong.
A tab is really a jump to a specific measurement that you set. That most word processors have tab stops automatically every half inch has only helped train people to not understand tabs.
And this is precisely why a tab is terrible for code. That convention makes sense for rich text but not at all for indenting code, which is the entire origin of the “spaces vs tabs” debate.